If someone tries to tell you that you shouldn’t vote for this campaign finance reform initiative because it fails to do away with dreaded special interest spending, fails to undo Citizens United, or fails to give every voter free artisan pot brownies and blowjobs, laugh in their fucking face and leave the room. A city initiative cannot fix our entire political system, which is and may forever be stacked in the favor of the people with the most money to spend. But we can start to empower those people who don’t have money so they get involved in the system, potentially leading to all sorts of structural change over the long term.
This initiative does a lot of good stuff—lowers campaign contribution limits, limits contributions from people who have city contracts or lobby city officials, improves requirements for candidates reporting the money they’re getting, and more. But its centerpiece is something called “democracy vouchers.” Those are paper coupons you will get in the mail—four of ’em, worth $25 each—that you can donate to candidates so they can redeem them for cash. That cash comes from a small 10-year, $30 million property tax levy (that’s about 12 bucks a year for the median Seattle home). By 2019, an online voucher system will exist, too. Sound weird? Yeah, new ideas sometimes sound weird. Get over it. Candidates opting into this new game could still take private money, but they would have caps on how much they could spend. (There are no such caps today.)
Now, this is the important part: The reason we need this initiative is that right now there are basically two classes of people out there—people who can afford to donate to political campaigns and people who can’t. And who do politicians court during election season and then listen to and help out once they’re in office? The first group. Who gets ignored? The second group. That makes those without money feel even less invested in the process, which makes them more likely to disengage altogether, which reinforces the whole damn problem.
