Seattle is trying something that aims to give low-income and middle-class voters a signal boost.
The city’s new Democracy Voucher Program, the first of its kind in the US, provides every eligible Seattle resident with US$100 in taxpayer-funded vouchers to donate to the candidate of their choice.
The goal is to incentivize candidates to take heed of a broad range of residents — homeless people, minimum-wage workers, seniors on fixed incomes — as well as the big-dollar donors who often dictate the political conversation.
Illustration: Yusha
Next month’s primary is the trial run for the program, but before Seattle can crow about having re-enfranchised long-overlooked voters, it must contend with conservative opposition.
The experiment comes at a time of seemingly new possibilities for campaign financing. US Senator Bernie Sanders demonstrated that small donors can float a campaign, with 99 percent of his donations coming from individual donors, 59 percent of which were considered small donations.
In fall last year, South Dakota voters approved a democracy voucher program similar to Seattle’s, joining more than a dozen other states with some form of public financing, usually a matching fund for small campaign donations. Cities such as Portland, Oregon, and Berkeley, California, also followed the public-financing trend last year.
In Seattle, “if we had a concerted effort to register, educate and organize renters and people who are homeless as a political force, our city politics would look rather different than they currently do,” said Alison Eisinger of the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness, which works to register homeless voters, among other advocacy efforts.
The democracy voucher program was created by a voter-approved ballot measure in November 2015, and is funded by a 10-year, US$30 million property tax levy. Registered voters are automatically sent the vouchers. Those who are not registered and those without a permanent address — such as homeless people — can apply by mail or in person with a city commission.
Seattle candidates are not required to participate in the voucher program, but Jon Grant, a left-wing city council candidate who previously led the Tenants Union of Washington, has made the vouchers a centerpiece of his campaign.
He has pushed to collect vouchers from more than 1,000 people, including those living in several homeless encampments.
Of the US$145,933 in donations that Grant reported in his most recent campaign disclosure form, US$128,800 was from vouchers.
“I took a pledge not to accept any money from corporations and developers,” Grant said. “I wanted to show that democracy vouchers can support grassroots campaigns that want to address systemic issues like homelessness.”
As part of that effort, Grant spent several months organizing in three unsanctioned homeless encampments, helping to set up a communal tent in one encampment and registering people to vote and receive vouchers.
“We wanted to work with those residents to assist them to stabilize their living situation and shine some light on how the city was handling the situation,” he said. “We started building trust and organizing there and wanted to educate people that they had access to democracy vouchers.”
Grant’s campaign received a few vouchers from them, but the city cleared the encampments before the campaign’s organizing efforts truly gained steam. Though they are gone, Grant is still working to engage homeless people around the city.
Yet, at the same time that Grant’s campaign is being cited as a democracy-voucher success, lawyers are presenting it as evidence in a bid to kill the program.
Libertarian law firm Pacific Legal Foundation (PLF) is representing two Seattle homeowners in their lawsuit against the city. They allege that democracy vouchers violate their first-amendment rights because their taxes are funding candidates they oppose.
PLF lawyer Ethan Blevins wrote in an e-mail that Grant’s campaign highlights “the injustice done to property owners who oppose his candidacy. Mr Grant’s views on rental housing clash with the interests of landlords — yet these are the very people who have unwillingly fronted most of the money for his campaign.”
University of Washington Constitutional law professor Hugh Spitzer said that some of their legal reasoning “doesn’t make any sense at all” and suggests a misunderstanding of how property taxes work.
Naturally, Grant agrees.
“The voucher program is very much in line with the values of most Seattle voters. This lawsuit is the death rattle of many corporate interests who were hoping to keep their hold on city hall,” he said.
Lawsuit aside, prospects for the vouchers are murky.
Vouchers alone would not change the political “status quo,” said Devin Silvernail, executive director of homeless advocacy organization Be:Seattle, which has launched an effort to help homeless people register to vote when they check into shelters.
“There are a lot of folks elected to office who, to be frank, don’t give a shit about people who are having a hard time,” he said.
Still, putting vouchers in homeless peoples’ hands “will be really useful as the start of a way for them to get their perspective known by elected officials,” he said.
Proponents must also combat feelings concerning the futility of voting.
“Our little voucher would be so small compared to corporate America’s donations,” said Soukaynah, a woman in her late 50s, who was part of a knitting circle at the Mary’s Place day center for homeless women in downtown Seattle.
Bobby Gene, a 75-year-old who also declined to give her last name, was homeless until she was recently placed in a low-income housing complex for seniors. She received democracy vouchers, but does not plan to use them.
“Maybe they would do some good, but politicians don’t want to listen to us,” she said.
Candidates, she suggested, as good as vanish once they attain office.
“We only see them when it’s time to vote, when they’re kissing babies and shaking hands. Then we never hear from them,” she said.
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has long been expansionist and contemptuous of international law. Under Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平), the CCP regime has become more despotic, coercive and punitive. As part of its strategy to annex Taiwan, Beijing has sought to erase the island democracy’s international identity by bribing countries to sever diplomatic ties with Taipei. One by one, China has peeled away Taiwan’s remaining diplomatic partners, leaving just 12 countries (mostly small developing states) and the Vatican recognizing Taiwan as a sovereign nation. Taiwan’s formal international space has shrunk dramatically. Yet even as Beijing has scored diplomatic successes, its overreach
For Taiwan, the ongoing US and Israeli strikes on Iranian targets are a warning signal: When a major power stretches the boundaries of self-defense, smaller states feel the tremors first. Taiwan’s security rests on two pillars: US deterrence and the credibility of international law. The first deters coercion from China. The second legitimizes Taiwan’s place in the international community. One is material. The other is moral. Both are indispensable. Under the UN Charter, force is lawful only in response to an armed attack or with UN Security Council authorization. Even pre-emptive self-defense — long debated — requires a demonstrably imminent
Since being re-elected, US President Donald Trump has consistently taken concrete action to counter China and to safeguard the interests of the US and other democratic nations. The attacks on Iran, the earlier capture of deposed of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro and efforts to remove Chinese influence from the Panama Canal all demonstrate that, as tensions with Beijing intensify, Washington has adopted a hardline stance aimed at weakening its power. Iran and Venezuela are important allies and major oil suppliers of China, and the US has effectively decapitated both. The US has continuously strengthened its military presence in the Philippines. Japanese Prime
After “Operation Absolute Resolve” to capture former Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, the US joined Israel on Saturday last week in launching “Operation Epic Fury” to remove Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and his theocratic regime leadership team. The two blitzes are widely believed to be a prelude to US President Donald Trump changing the geopolitical landscape in the Indo-Pacific region, targeting China’s rise. In the National Security Strategic report released in December last year, the Trump administration made it clear that the US would focus on “restoring American pre-eminence in the Western hemisphere,” and “competing with China economically and militarily
RSS