In January 2017, every resident of Seattle received a small white packet in the mail. Inside each of these packets was free money — a cumulative total of $54 million dollars — from the city of Seattle.
Well, it was not exactly free money. The city had given each resident $100, not in cash but in “democracy vouchers,” with the goal of allowing every Seattleite the opportunity to donate to a political campaign of their choosing.
In 2015, voters passed “Honest Elections Seattle,” a citizen-led initiative to reform campaign finance rules. As part of that initiative, the democracy vouchers program was born.
Seattle’s democracy vouchers are part of the city’s experiment to increase political engagement and reduce the power of big money in politics through a system of public funding for political campaigns. Though the program was a success in 2017, only with time and expansion will it become clear if the vouchers represent a long-term solution to some of the problems plaguing American democracy.
The Money Problem
The issue of money in politics commands rare bipartisan agreement. Politicians from Joe Biden to Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders to Rick Santorum have spoken out against the corrupting nature of money in politics.
Given money’s importance to candidates for advertising and logistical organizing, it is unsurprising that 88 percent of 2018 U.S. House races were won by the candidate that spent the most money. Those midterms were the most expensive in history, despite the fact that less than half of 1 percent of Americans donated more than $200 to a political campaign. Instead, this money overwhelmingly came from the richest families in America, who donate millions each cycle to swing elections and influence policies. This disparity may be why 85 percent of Americans surveyed in a CBS News poll believe that the system needs “fundamental changes” or “to be completely rebuilt.”
The problems created by this political financing system are not easy to fix, especially in light of the Supreme Court’s decisions in Citizens United and Buckley v. Valeo about campaign finance and freedom of speech. But Seattle’s democracy vouchers represent one potential way to reduce the power of big money: flood the city with small money. The program is an experiment in re-democratizing political campaigns.
Wayne Barnett is the executive director of the program and was tasked with making democracy vouchers a reality. In an interview with the HPR, Barnett outlined three key goals for the program, two of which he said were met in the 2017 city council races. “One [of the goals] was to increase the number of people who could mount a credible campaign for office … One of the things you frequently hear from candidates is, ‘I can’t raise a quarter of a million dollars to mount a credible campaign for office.’ So this was intended to help campaigns for people without ample resources.”
“The second goal, which I think was also met, was to engage residents more in the early stages of the political process,” Barnett said. “Even if your name appears on the ballot, if you’ve never been able to afford a mailing or if you’ve never been able to afford to run a radio or a TV ad, chances are people aren’t going to know what you stand for. So this was a way to give citizens a larger voice in who was going to be able to mount a campaign. I think we tripled our highest number of contributors we’d ever seen before, so I think that’s a success.”
“The third goal, which I’m not sure is ever going to be an achievable goal, is to reduce the amount of money spent on political campaigns,” he added, “to get big money out of politics. On that front, that was not a success. We didn’t see this bring down the cost of campaigns.”
However, even though the total cost of campaigns did not go down, the number of small-dollar contributions increased significantly, especially from young people, low-income communities, and people of color.
An Activist-Turned-Candidate
When Teresa Mosqueda got that small white packet in her mail, she glanced at it for a moment before tossing it into her recycling pile, unopened. She figured that it was probably just another letter from the city about recycling logistics.
It was only a few days later that Mosqueda realized that it might contain the democracy vouchers she had heard about. She pulled the envelope out of her recycling pile, opened it up, and found her $100.
The irony is that Mosqueda was running for Seattle City Council at the time and was one of the first six candidates to participate in the program. Mosqueda’s race for the Eighth District citywide seat against community organizer Jon Grant embodied the goals of the vouchers.
Mosqueda is a lifelong activist turned first-time candidate. She is a Mexican American woman and a labor union activist. She was also a renter in a city where the skyrocketing price of housing is one of the biggest political issues on the ballot. She was exactly the type of candidate Barnett said the vouchers program hoped to encourage.
Before declaring her candidacy in 2017, Mosqueda worked at the Washington State Labor Council, where she encouraged women and people of color to run for office. In an interview with the HPR, Mosqueda recalled, “Everyone would ask, ‘Why not you?’ And when the democracy vouchers came along, it was an extra push to get over that final hurdle.”
In the shadow of the 2016 election, Mosqueda wanted to run a campaign focused on engaging the many disenchanted Seattleites. Democracy vouchers allowed her to do that. “I was able to go to each of these rallies, like the Women’s March or the March for Science, with my pink hat on, a protest sign in one hand and a clipboard with my petition in the other to collect the 400 signatures I needed to qualify for the vouchers. It gave a way for people to be engaged by marching with their feet and also signing a petition to have local elections that truly represent them.”
After qualifying for the program, Mosqueda would spend hours on weekends knocking on doors, talking directly with voters about the political issues that mattered to them, and ultimately asking for their democracy vouchers.
“In the citywide elections, the traditional political strategy is that these citywide elected officials don’t have to do any doorknocking, which is not good,” Mosqueda said. “If you want a representative democracy, if you want policy ideas generated from the community, if you want the community to hold [officials] responsible, you want candidates to go door to door and to have conversations with people about what matters to them and their neighborhood.”
“But often people were restricted from doing that because they had to spend time raising money. I was able to go door to door and say I was accepting democracy vouchers and looking for their support and they’d run and grab their vouchers and sign them over to me.”
As the campaign picked up, the vouchers started flowing in, and Mosqueda’s campaign started getting checks from the city. First they received a check for $4,000 to the campaign, then one for $12,000, and then one for $40,000. Mosqueda ended up raising the maximum amount a candidate was allowed to raise through the program: a total of $300,000.
In the end, Mosqueda won her race against another democracy vouchers candidate, Jon Grant. Both candidates were progressives and community activists who would have had a hard time raising as much money and canvassing the city had it not been for the program. Mosqueda said she believed the program had provided an incentive for Seattleites to be involved in the political process.
“We had some of the highest turnout rates ever because I think people were committed to seeing the election through. They sent in their democracy vouchers, they stayed engaged, and they sent in their ballots. I think that this is a really powerful tool to make sure that more individuals, especially working families, women, people of color, lower income folks, and middle income folks are donating to campaigns and helping to elect people that will truly represent them.”
The 2017 elections — the first elections held with the democracy vouchers program in place — witnessed a 16 percent increase in the number of ballots cast from the 2015 election. The numbers show that the vouchers program increased not only the number but also the diversity of donors.
The Experiment and Voter Engagement
If the goal of campaign finance reform is to increase the involvement of the people, the program looks like a promising possible solution.
Looking back, Barnett said, “I think we had really robust races for all those positions that were eligible for democracy vouchers. The open seat race had two candidates that both raised and spent more than $300,000. I think that was one of the goals of the program and I think it played out. We had a robust debate about where the city should go, and I don’t think either candidate would be able to legitimately claim that they didn’t have enough money to get their message out.”
Pat Murakami agreed that the democracy vouchers program gave more of a voice to the people. Murakami also ran in 2017, for a different citywide seat on the Seattle City Council. She lost that race, but is running again for a districted seat in 2019. Murakami participated in the democracy vouchers program in 2017 and is participating again in 2019.
“I think that [the program] … empowers people to be more involved. That $100 is a significant donation, so the people that may not typically be able to afford to donate, it gives them more power in who’s elected,” Murakami said in an interview with the HPR. “I think it’s great that you don’t need wealthy connections or ties to the big developers to get elected.”
The increased voter engagement accounted for Barnett’s belief that the 2017 races were a success, and he thinks that this success has led other cities to begin looking at starting similar programs. He is cautiously optimistic about the program’s prospects, but said only time will tell what the full impact of the program was. Barnett said he was “cautious of labeling the program an amazing success or a disappointment or anything because it’s the first program of its kind and has only had a few races.”
He also cautioned that the program is expensive, and that other state or local governments considering similar programs have to weigh this cost alongside the anticipated benefits. To pay for the program, Seattle raised property taxes by $3 million per year. Barnett mentioned that New York City was considering a voucher-style proposal but was surprised by the amount it would cost.
“These vouchers have to be mailed to everyone in the jurisdiction. To mail vouchers to every resident of New York City, for example, would not be an inexpensive undertaking,” Barnett said.
The 2019 Seattle City Council elections will offer another test for the vouchers program. All seven districts already have candidates looking to participate if they receive enough qualifying signatures.
Ultimately, the success or failure of democracy vouchers will be determined over the coming years as Seattle holds more elections and other cities experiment with similar public vouchers programs. But the initial signs are promising; Seattle’s vouchers experiment has increased small-dollar donations in a political system dominated by big donations from billionaires, and instead of getting rid of big money, the program reduced its impact by flooding campaigns with small money and by increasing political engagement among the people of Seattle. Though more experimentation is needed, Seattle’s democracy vouchers are a promising model for a system that could make American elections fairer and more open for all.
Image Credit: Unsplash/Ben Dutton