On Monday, Mayor Bruce Harrell announced his proposal to renew Seattle’s Democracy Voucher Program, the first of its kind in the country.
Begun 10 years ago, the program provides eligible Seattle residents with four $25 vouchers, for a total of $100. These vouchers act like campaign donations and can be assigned to any local candidates who are participating in the program and haven’t yet reached their funding cap. Candidates in federal, state and countywide races are not eligible for the Seattle-only program.
“Democracy vouchers as a tool have allowed more people to participate in campaign financing in our city, making the political process more accessible and inclusive, and indeed, that is its intent,” Harrell said. “This program is a local success story, and how we can support increased municipal elections and empower candidates and voters from all backgrounds to have a meaningful role in our democracy.”
The history of democracy vouchers
Back in 2003, a group of citizens formed an organization called Washington Public Campaigns (now Fix Democracy First), which worked to lift a statewide ban on public financing for local campaigns passed in 1992. They achieved this goal in 2008.
Proponents, including current Seattle City Attorney candidate Rory O’Sullivan, ran an initiative to pass public campaign financing in 2013. The Seattle Times was against the measure, and The Stranger supported it. It went on to lose by less than one point.
Supporters tried again in 2015 with the Honest Elections in Seattle campaign, and this time they succeeded, creating the Democracy Voucher Program that Seattle uses today.
O’Sullivan helped to craft the language of the initiative. “We want to make sure that folks who have a lot of community support can put together campaigns and run, and we want more participation from the community,” O’Sullivan told The Urbanist. “So when you’re running a democracy voucher campaign, you have to go out and talk to thousands of people to raise the money, and so this is an opportunity to talk to all these people about what you would do, what you would change.”
This 10-year program has been financed by a $3 million annual property tax levy, costing the average Seattle homeowner about $12 per year, which Harrell called “a nominal cost.”
A University of Washington study on the first two cycles of the program found a 53% increase in total election contributions and a 350% increase in the number of unique donors, as well as a 86% increase in the number of participating candidates.
“Since 2017 more than 106,000 residents have contributed vouchers to candidates and city elections, distributing over $10 million to local campaigns,” Harrell said. “This program has led to a more diverse pool of people running for office, reflecting the diversity of our city and leading to more competitive races here in Seattle.”
Harrell’s proposal would not make any changes to the existing program and levy. Voters will decide whether to approve the measure during the August primary election on August 5.
Democracy vouchers are popular
Dr. Jennifer Heerwig, who co-wrote Democracy Vouchers and the Promise of Fairer Elections in Seattle, praised the program.
“Overall, I think the program has been a success in the ways that we can measure success for these types of reforms,” Heerwig told The Urbanist.
Heerwig and her co-author Brian McCabe have been tracking the program since its inception in 2017. Their research has confirmed that both donors and candidates for offices in eligible races have been more racially and economically diverse since the program was instituted.
“We’ve found huge increases in the percentage of voters who donate a voucher, relative to the percentage of folks who were donating cash before the program began,” Heerwig said.
The research has also tracked the sociodemographic characteristics of the donor pool. “We’ve found an uptick in the representation of people of color, lower-income, and younger folks among voucher users, relative to traditional cash donors, especially those who donated before the voucher program,” Heerwig said.
Seattle Councilmember Bob Kettle supports the program, in which he participated during his own Council run in 2023. “While the other Washington is faltering, our city, a city of hills, can be that bright light to the nation and really the world, with the Democracy Voucher Program, and might I say, especially combined with our top-two system,” Kettle said.
Several community organizations were in attendance at the press conference to show their own support for democracy vouchers.
“We have broken down financial barriers and given working class and low-income voters a real voice in our democracy, and it is working. More diverse candidates are running for office, and community driven campaigns are thriving,” said Waldo Waldron-Ramsey, the political director of Washington Community Action Network. “Candidates now engage with all of us, not just the wealthy few. Seattle has proven that democracy should not be for sale. It should belong to all of us.”
Hannah Lindell-Smith, the coalition coordinator for People Powered Elections Washington, thinks the program helps young people become more involved in local politics.
“Money in politics in particular, it impacts everything. It impacts our representatives. It impacts the policies that touch your lives every single day, from transportation to climate to schools, education, healthcare, and none of that can happen in this current system where corporate donors are really just prioritized,” Lindell-Smith told The Urbanist. “The democracy vouchers program challenges that in a really direct and very competitive way.”
Supporters see the program as an innovative model for the rest of the state and nation to follow.
“I think by renewing this program, it will galvanize a political movement to really look at how we can transform and invest in our ballot box,” said Bailey Medilo, the digital communications organizer for the Washington Bus. “Who knows, could we ride this train to the state? We could ride this train to the federal level, if we get really lucky. All of this…is going to be the end of the experiment, and the entry into this program being a staple, an institution.”
A piece of legislation passed by the U.S. House of Representatives in 2021 contained a provision for a national pilot voucher program to finance a few House races. However, it didn’t get past the Senate.
“There’s been a considerable amount of interest at the local level, though, with several municipalities in California making the initial steps toward exploring a program for their local elections,” Heerwig said.
Linda Taylor and Nick Jeffreys, both from the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle, emphasized how important it is to provide education about democracy vouchers, ideally in many languages. They said that right now, many people don’t know about it until they receive their vouchers in the mail, showing the necessity for strategic outreach, especially to 18- to 30-year-olds and elders.
Unintended consequences?
As it stands, the Democracy Voucher Program is underutilized. In 2023, the program had a participation rate of 4.72%, and existing funding levels would not be sufficient to see a large increase in participation rates.
Critics have other concerns as well.
“There are unintended consequences that need to be thought through to meet the intent of the legislation,” Michael Charles, the managing partner of political consulting firm Upper Left Strategies, told The Urbanist.
Charles and Michael Fertakis, a principal at the same firm, published a critique of the program in early 2023, saying that the low spending caps the program requires of participants gives an outsized advantage to candidates who benefit from political action committee (PAC) independent expenditure campaigns.
“Without making some significant changes, we’re just empowering outside spending from these PACs more and more,” Charles said.
Well-financed campaigns have become more savvy about timing how late they exceed the cap on donations, which triggers the voucher cap being lifted for their opponents. This now tends to happen in the last month of campaigning, not giving democracy voucher participants enough time to raise additional money when their caps are lifted.
Candidates must weigh whether they’ll participate in the program and be placed at a financial disadvantage as a result due to the caps, or whether they’ll decline to participate and potentially face criticism. This is particularly true of more progressive candidates, whose supporters might expect them to use the program.
A case in point is Kshama Sawant, who refused to participate in the program for her 2019 reelection campaign. She predicted she’d have $1 million in spending against her, which proved to be true, with more than half of that coming from PAC money. At the time, she released a statement saying, “The Democracy Voucher program is a progressive step forward, but unfortunately it’s not designed for a race like ours where Amazon and the whole big business establishment is united against us. It does not prevent corporate PACs from overnight dumping hundreds of thousands of dollars into the race to try to buy the election.”
Sawant faced criticism for her choice, but because she didn’t have to adhere to the fundraising cap, she was able to raise $477,000, which gave her a fighting chance against the $1 million spent against her. Even so, the race was relatively close; Sawant won with 51.8% of the vote.
In 2021, Seattle Council President Sara Nelson also declined to participate in the voucher program — although in her case, corporate PAC money was overwhelmingly on her side. PACs contributed almost $500,000 on her behalf, either for her or against her primary opponent, nonprofit leader Nikkita Oliver. Nelson also outraised Oliver on the campaign side, even with Oliver’s voucher boost. Nelson ended up winning by eight points.
Ron Davis was a participant in the program for his City Council D4 seat run in 2023. He says he supports the program but agrees that it needs reform. “I think the key here is that PAC funding is out of control and is dominant relative to the caps,” he said.
There are many changes that could be considered to address this and other issues, including raising fundraising caps or getting rid of them altogether and allocating more vouchers per resident. Davis said he’d also like to see separate fundraising caps for vouchers and regular donation dollars.
A more difficult reach would be creating stricter rules around how PACs can operate, which would directly address a root cause of campaign financing issues. However, due to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling, it is unclear how this could be accomplished within current legal restraints.
Giving campaigns access to canvass apartment buildings would be another, parallel reform that would help democratize local elections. “The goals of the voucher program are better served by access,” Davis said.
Additionally, Davis spoke in favor of even-year elections, noting that holding local elections in odd-numbered years drives down voter turnout and leads to a less diverse electorate. A state bill to allow certain municipalities to switch to even-year elections died this week when it failed to get a House floor vote before the cut-off date.
Next steps
The Mayor’s Office will transmit the democracy vouchers levy legislation to the City Council and ask them to refer it to Seattle voters.
Harrell said he wasn’t considering any changes to the democracy vouchers program before its renewal, but he said he would construct a work group to look at changes that could be made in the future. This means when voters go to the ballot box on August 5, they will be voting on the program as-is.
Davis was unimpressed by this lack of response. “The fact that we’ve had this program for 10 years and we’re about to reauthorize it, but Bruce Harrell’s answer is we should start a work group suggests sort of a deep unseriousness at the City for moving the City forward when it comes to democratic participation,” Davis said.
Still, the democracy voucher program is showing undeniable results. “The democracy voucher program represents a more inclusive mission of democracy, one where everyone has a voice, not just those who can vote or make large donations,” said Cinthia Illan-Vazquez, the executive director of the Washington Bus. “By renewing this program, we’re affirming that Seattle values the inputs of all of its residents.”
If the renewal vote fails, the program would expire and candidates would lose an important funding tool that has expanded access to the political process.
Amy Sundberg is the publisher of Notes from the Emerald City, a weekly newsletter on Seattle politics and policy with a particular focus on public safety, police accountability, and the criminal legal system. She also writes science fiction, fantasy, and horror novels. She is particularly fond of Seattle’s parks, where she can often be found walking her little dog.
