It’s time to dig through your pile of unpaid bills and Safeway coupons. We’ve got a special election coming, and your ballot’s due on Tuesday. Let's get into it. 

At its simplest, King County Proposition 1 is a levy renewal. It would continue funding the Automated Fingerprint Identification System (AFIS), a massive biometric database that stores over 3 million fingerprint and palm print records and helps police connect prints left at crime scenes to people. It also confirms the identities of arrestees, preventing people from being wrongfully detained or released under false names.

On its face, Prop 1 may seem tempting enough. This is, after all, a levy with no organized opposition (as you’ll see on your ballot), endorsed by nearly all King County Councilmembers (yep, even the ones you like), and designed to renew a decades-old program that helps solve crimes and identify the dead, sometimes those beyond recognition. It’s relatively inexpensive—about $24 a year for the average homeowner—and funds forensic infrastructure across 39 cities and unincorporated King County.

There’s no question that it’s better for local police departments to share a centralized, taxpayer-funded forensic system than to duplicate these services piecemeal at additional public cost. The people who currently run AFIS do seem to take privacy concerns seriously. Additionally, the system doesn’t store citizenship data, and it complies with King County’s ban on facial recognition. As of now, AFIS doesn’t collaborate with ICE (because of the Keep Washington Working Act), doesn’t scoop up facial scans, and doesn’t seem particularly interested in expanding beyond its current scope.

But what if that changes? But even reasonable-sounding systems can be dangerous when left unscrutinized. Surveillance overreach isn’t tinfoil hat anymore. It’s a Tuesday. And surveillance tools rarely stay in their lane for long. We can't afford to blindly renew government tracking tools—no matter how routine—without first demanding detailed accountability, privacy protections, and public oversight.

We asked Tee Sannon, the Technology Policy Program Director at the ACLU of Washington, and she flagged serious concerns about AFIS—from its potential for abuse to the lack of public transparency around how the system actually works. While the ACLU hasn’t taken an official stance on Prop 1 (they didn’t last time either), Sannon made it clear that questions about how this biometric data is managed, and what might happen to it down the line—are more urgent than ever in today’s political climate. Could this data be repurposed later? Used in ways the public never agreed to? That uncertainty alone should give us pause.

AFIS is a surveillance system, and like all surveillance systems, it lives inside a criminal legal infrastructure with a long and ongoing track record of racism, data misuse, and mission creep. And right now, this system operates with little meaningful public oversight, and just as little transparency about how it impacts the communities most likely to be swept up in it.

Back in 2018, we told voters to reject the AFIS levy because it came bundled with facial recognition software, tech we didn’t want then and still don’t trust now. To their credit, the county banned facial recognition in 2021, and AFIS officials say the software has been disabled. But pay special attention to that word: disabled, not deleted. Not dismantled. 

We shouldn’t expect the erosion of civil liberties to creep at a snail's place. Change is coming at the speed and volume of an avalanche. The federal government is hoarding surveillance powers and conducting warrantless data grabs. It’s proudly throwing immigrants like Kilmar Ábrego García in foreign prisons they may never escape. And the ICE snatch job on Rumeysa Ozturk, taken into an unmarked van by plainclothes federal agents, looked awfully like a secret police operation. Our civil liberties aren’t being chipped away at, they’re being jackhammered. So forgive us if we’re slightly suspicious of any system that collects biometric data on hundreds of thousands of people, promises it’s “just for fingerprints,” and asks us to trust that it will never, ever be used for anything nefarious.

This time around, Prop 1 supporters say there’s nothing to worry about. No facial recognition. No new biometrics. No big expansion. Just a routine renewal. Just trust us.

We’d be skeptical of that any day, but today? Today the federal government is pulling every lever it can find to surveil the population and amass information that can support its agenda of mass deportations—and that’s just what’s happening three months into the administration. 

Prop 1 allows data collected by AFIS to be shared with state and federal agencies—including the FBI—without any clear, enforceable restrictions. Once that data leaves King County’s hands, the Keep Washington Working Act (which keeps Washington law enforcement from participating in immigration enforcement) doesn’t protect our state’s immigrants. The data AFIS collects can be repurposed for uses that are opaque to the public and often hostile to civil liberties.

Worse, the public has no real way to see how the system is being used. AFIS doesn’t publish regular audits or racial breakdowns of whose prints are in the system. There are no citizen oversight bodies empowered to review its operations. There are no requirements for public disclosure when policies change or technologies expand.

AFIS is a biometric dragnet in an era when rights are increasingly fragile, and when the difference between “not used for this” and “can’t legally be used for this” matters more than ever.

Supporters of Prop 1 argue that rejecting this levy will delay investigations, hurt cold case resolution, and force local departments to pay more for worse systems. That might be true. But that’s an indictment of how little effort has been made to rebuild AFIS into something accountable and transparent, not a reason to keep funding it without conditions.

Voting no on Prop 1 is a vote demanding more from a system that has quietly amassed the biometric data of millions of people and is asking for our continued trust with almost no strings attached. 

We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: Surveillance systems don’t get safer when we stop paying attention. They expand when we’re distracted. They deepen when we stop asking questions. And eventually, predictably, they turn toward us.

We’re in a crisis of government, morality, and sanity right now. Anything that helps authoritarianism is worth saying no to, and finding new ways to make it work. 

We urge you to vote “No” on King County Proposition No 1. 

The Stranger Election Control Board is Nathalie Graham, Marcus Harrison Green, Vivian McCall, Charles Mudede, Emily Nokes, Megan Seling, a very stale Peep from Easter 2020, and Hannah Murphy Winter.