That flow of money isn’t transparent, says Olivia Zink, executive director of Open Democracy, a nonpartisan group that advocates for public campaign funding in New Hampshire. “You can drive a Mack Truck through the loopholes in our current campaign finance system,” she says. 

Political action committees can make unlimited contributions in the state, an individual can donate up to $15,000 to a candidate in state elections every cycle, and companies can evade contribution limits by funneling the money through different LLCs, she says. Meanwhile, a significant portion of campaign contributions come from outside of New Hampshire, though it’s difficult to know exactly how much because of weak reporting. 

With a bill recently introduced in New Hampshire’s House of Representatives, reformers like Zink hope to flip the current system on its head. The bill creates a “voter-owned certificate” program (a system also known as “democracy vouchers”) intended to encourage small donations, disempower wealthy donors, and limit the influence of out-of-state contributors. 

The program would mail every eligible voter four $25 vouchers during each two-year election cycle. Recipients could then donate any or all of those vouchers to candidates who have opted into the system and agreed to abide by certain restrictions. 

“In every election, there’s a primary before the primary, it’s called the donor primary,” Russell Muirhead, the Democratic lawmaker who introduced House Bill 324, said on Tuesday during a hearing of the state House Election Law Committee. “This bill tries to eradicate that donor primary and give the power back to New Hampshire voters.”

The proposal mirrors a campaign financing system implemented by Seattle in 2017. There, democracy vouchers have diversified and grown the pool of people giving money to political campaigns, and made city races more competitive in the process. 

Seattle’s program won its first convert in late 2022, when Oakland voters approved a local ballot measure that will create a “democracy vouchers” program in future city elections.  

Now, proponents are dreaming bigger and hope to set up such an initiative at the state level. In addition to New Hampshire, Minnesota Democrats have proposed creating “democracy vouchers” as part of a broad voting rights package they introduced this year, shortly after taking control of the state government.

For a state to adopt this campaign funding model would be a huge boost for the democracy vouchers movement, according to Adam Eichen, executive director of Equal Citizens, a national nonprofit that advocates for election reform.

“The significance of winning the first statewide democracy voucher program cannot be overstated,” he says. “We see again and again that all it takes is one state to be a leader on an empowering, novel democracy policy and the idea will quickly spread across the country.” 

HB 324 would bring democracy vouchers to New Hampshire’s highest-profile elections. At least at the beginning, the only eligible races would be for governor and executive council, the five-member body that has veto power over pardons, gubernatorial nominations, and contracts with a value greater than $10,000. Zink says these council races used to be sleepy affairs but have become much more contentious recently, especially after the group voted against multiple rounds of contracts with Planned Parenthood. 

Participating in New Hampshire’s program would be voluntary for candidates, and gubernatorial candidates would become eligible only after collecting 2,500 small-dollar donations (500 for executive council candidates). Those who qualified could get up to $420,000 in vouchers for the governor’s race ($84,000 for executive council), and they’d also be eligible for a $1 million grant for a contested general election ($60,000 for executive counselors) in addition to any money raised with voter vouchers. 

In exchange, candidates would have to heed certain restrictions, like a cap on personal donations to the campaign, a limit of no more than 10 percent out-of-state contributions, and a ban on soliciting independent expenditures. 

In Seattle, where the requirements are similar, the program applies to a wide swath of municipal elections, and has been enormously popular. The current mayor, city attorney, and seven of the nine city councilors used the program in their last election. Meanwhile, the number of donors per race has gone up by 350 percent, and candidates reported hundreds of thousands more in donations of under $200, reducing their reliance on a small batch of wealthy donors, according to a study of Seattle conducted by Alan Griffith, a scholar at the University of Washington. 

The same study also found an 86 percent increase in the number of candidates and a large decrease in incumbent electoral success, suggesting that races have become more competitive. Meanwhile, anecdotal evidence suggests that the program is attracting new kinds of candidates as well. Teresa Mosqueda, a labor organizer who launched her 2017 campaign for city council while working full time, renting a one-bedroom apartment, and still paying off student loans, said the program’s existence pushed her to run. 

Compared to traditional cash donors of the kind who regularly participate in elections, the voucher users were also more likely to be young and lower-income contributors, according to a 2020 study conducted by researchers at Stony Brook and Georgetown Universities. 

Activists in Oakland were eager to realize these outcomes, especially amid a torrent of outside funding in their elections. In 2020, wealthy donors poured more than $1.2 million into pro-charter groups supporting school board candidates, most of whom ended up winning. In fact, between 2014 and 2020, 77 percent of all the city’s contested races were won by the candidate who raised the most money.  

After Oakland’s city council agreed to refer the measure to the ballot, voters approved it by a nearly three-to-one margin last November, and the program is scheduled to begin next year.

Muirhead, the lead sponsor for the New Hampshire bill, is excited that a person might feel more invested in the electoral process after they donate to a candidate. 

“That ties them to a person, to a campaign, maybe even to a movement or a party, and that’s a really cool thing,” Muirhead told Bolts. Besides sitting in the House, Muirhead is a Dartmouth University professor who researches the theory and practice of democracy; he is teaching a course this year on the phenomenon of “democratic erosion.”

Should his proposal pass and succeed, the commission responsible for its administration could recommend that it be expanded to candidates for the state legislature, and then again those for the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives. 

However, the bill is facing a number of obstacles. Its main two sponsors are Democrats, but Republicans control both chambers of the state legislature—even though Democratic candidates made major gains in and nearly tied the state House in November. 

On Tuesday, the House Election Law Committee, which is split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, deadlocked 10 to 10 on the legislation. This means that the bill moves to the House floor without a recommendation of the committee.

The vice chair of the committee, Republican Ross Berry, was among those who voted against it. 

“I am opposed to these sort of taxpayer funded schemes because they violate the freedom of association and speech by forcing taxpayers to finance political campaigns that they may disagree with,” Berry told Bolts in an email. 

Still, Zink believes that the legislation has enough bipartisan support to pass the state House floor but that supporters need to persuade another Republican to lend in the Senate. They must also convince Republican Governor Chris Sununu, who has raised over $2 million from industry groups over the 13 years he’s been in office, especially real estate ($364,000), lawyers and lobbyists ($282,718), and automotive entities ($181,210), according to FollowTheMoney.org. 

“We will have to do a lot of lobbying, and calls, and bipartisan support to get our Republican governor to sign it,” says Zink.  

Muirhead expects other legislators to object to the bill’s costs. First are the administration fees: mailing out the certificates to every registered voter, determining candidates’ eligibility and enforcing the rules, maintaining the public database of every contribution, and publicizing and explaining the program to the public. Seattle spent about $1.3 million on these services in 2021, though Zink estimates that it would cost New Hampshire $500,000 annually. 

Then there’s the campaign funding itself. 

Assuming a field of a dozen candidates for executive council and two candidates for governor, Zink says the program will cost $6.2 million a year, or $12.4 million every election cycle. The bill includes four sources of funding: voluntary contributions, fines from campaign finance violations, interests that the fund accrues, and an earmark from the governor. Still, the exact funding mechanisms remain to be settled by lawmakers, Muirhead says. 

Zink says that the current system costs taxpayers even more than the voter-owned alternative would. “Allowing private companies to finance our elections means we’re actually paying for policies that benefit those big donors.” 

That argument may not be enough to persuade Republican politicians in New Hampshire to embrace an idea that’s only been tested in one of America’s most liberal cities.

But the idea may catch on in state governments elsewhere. If Minnesota passes the recently introduced Democracy for the People Act, its existing public financing system would shift from retroactively refunding campaign contributors, which few people know about or participate in, to proactively mailing two, $25 vouchers to all registered voters. These vouchers could then go to participating candidates in races for governor, state house and senate, secretary of state, and attorney general. 

In Minnesota, unlike in New Hampshire, Democrats control the governorship and both chambers of the legislature. Even so, elected lawmakers may be reluctant to change the status quo. 

Tellingly, in both Oakland and Seattle, voters were ultimately the ones who approved the program via ballot initiatives, not politicians. In that sense, these new  bills are the most ambitious yet. 

“I think it’s possible but not likely,” says Muirhead about his bill’s potential to pass the legislature. Muirhead sponsored a similar bill last year, which failed. 

“We are taking the long view. We believe that we can renovate American democracy, but we have to do it the old fashioned way, by persuading people one-by-one,” he says. “That takes time.” 

The post Campaign Finance Reformers Hope to Convert Their First State to Democracy Vouchers appeared first on Bolts.

In Michigan and Connecticut, they made it easier for people to vote early in future elections. In at least six localities, voters adopted ranked-choice voting. Oakland, California, adopted a new experiment in leveling the playing field in campaign spending. And other measures will try out new approaches to increasing participation locally. 

“It’s great to see voters embracing pro-democracy reforms to make the voting process easier and more inclusive,” Josh Douglas, a University of Kentucky professor who specializes in election law and was watching a wide array of ballot measures on Tuesday, told Bolts. “When we make it easy to vote, and when turnout improves as a result, then democracy wins.”

The biggest expansion of ballot access on Tuesday comes with the passage of Michigan’s Proposal 2, a catchall measure that amends the state constitution to make voting easier while also protecting against efforts to curtail voting rights launched in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. 

The proposal, backed by a coalition of Michigan organizations that support expanding voting rights, will establish nine days of early in-person voting, create new mandates for townships to set up ballot drop boxes, and supply state-funded postage to vote by mail. It passed handily with 60 percent of the vote.

“It’s the role of our government to make sure people have the ability to vote and aren’t bogged down by constructed barriers,” Branden Snyder, co-executive director of a Detroit group backing the measure, told Bolts in October. 

Yvonne White, president of NAACP Michigan, another member of the coalition, celebrated the result this week, stating in a press release that, “Proposal 2 helps to ensure that every eligible voter in Michigan will have their vote counted without intimidation, harassment or interference.”

Early voting also notched a win in Connecticut, which has some of the nation’s strictest rules for people who hope to vote before an Election Day; voters there adopted a constitutional amendment that authorizes the legislature to set up early voting. (It does not mandate this, unlike Michigan’s.)

At the local level, voters adopted a variety of innovations in campaign and voting procedures, with an eye to revitalizing democracy. Oakland, California passed a measure to revamp campaign finance and implement a democracy vouchers program in future local elections. It leads with 69 percent of the vote as of publication.

The program would provide each eligible voter with four $25 vouchers to donate to the candidate of their choice for upcoming city and school board elections, Bolts reported in July. Proponents of Measure W, modeled after a similar one that passed in Seattle in 2017, hope to draw more residents into the electoral process as small donors and candidates, while also increasing transparency in campaign finance. Since Seattle implemented its program, it has seen a 350 percent increase in the number of donors per race, and the pool of candidates in local races has diversified.

Other provisions in Measure W would lower the cap on campaign contributions for city races to $600, and require campaign ads to list their top three contributors. Jonathan Mehta Stein, executive director of California Common Cause, which supported the measure, says democratizing campaign funding is a means of democratizing the governing process.

“We have hyper concentrated political giving in the hands of a tiny and totally non-representative slice of Oakland,” Stein told Bolts. “The majority of Oakland, which is working class and communities of color, has virtually no political giving power—and that changes who can run for and win, and it changes what ideas are taken seriously.”

Oakland also appeared poised to adopt a separate initiative to enable noncitizen residents who have children in city schools to vote in school board races. Noncitizen voting, which has long existed in some localities around the country, has spread over the past year, including to some municipalities in Vermont. But voters in Oregon’s Multnomah County turned down a measure on the issue on Tuesday, and Ohio voters adopted a constitutional amendment to ban noncitizen voting in local and state elections. 

In San Francisco, California, and Boulder, Colorado, voters approved proposals to move city elections from odd-numbered to even-numbered years so that they coincide with federal and statewide elections, which will boost turnout.

And at least six jurisdictions nationwide voted to institute new ranked-choice voting systems. Proponents of the procedure, which asks people to rank candidates by order of preference rather than just opt for one, say it helps better reflect voters’ preferences.

Ranked-choice measures appear to have passed in Ojaj, California; Fort Collins, Colorado; Evanston, Illinois; Portland, Maine; Portland, Oregon; and Multnomah County, Oregon (which includes Portland). In Washington State, Clark and San Juan counties rejected ranked-choice voting, and the fate of a similar measure in Seattle was inconclusive as of publication.

But all eyes were in Nevada, a critical swing state voting on whether to adopt ranked-choice voting for state and congressional races; Alaska and Maine are the only states that already do this. Ballot Question 3 leads by 3 percentage points as of publication, with remaining ballots likely to lean in its favor. (Update: The Nevada Independent called the referendum in favor of Question 3 on Nov. 11.)

Before ranked-choice voting comes to Nevada, though, voters would need to approve it a second time in 2024 due to the state’s multi-year process for adopting constitutional amendments.

As Bolts reported in September, establishment politicians from both parties criticized the measure as too complicated and confusing for voters. But proponents of Question 3, which would also get rid of the state’s closed primaries, saw it as shifting power away from big-party politics and back to voters in a state where the largest plurality of voters are either nonpartisan or members of a minority party. 

According to FairVote, a national organization that supports ranked-choice voting, Tuesday’s results mean that there are now 61 jurisdictions that will use ranked-choice voting in their elections. Critical elections, including a U.S. Senate race in Alaska, a U.S. House race in Maine, and the DA race in San Francisco, are set to be resoled by ranked-choice voting in coming weeks.

The energy around these democracy measures come at the same time that voting rights have come under attack. 

Michigan’s ballot proposal was written to include defensive measures against the attacks on election systems that emerged from the Trumpian lie that the 2020 election results in Michigan were invalid. Conspiracies about widespread fraud resulted in at least one county canvasser board resisting certifying election results, outside groups calling for an independent audit of statewide results, and Republican legislators introducing a slate of bills that hemmed in people’s ability to access the ballot. 

The drafters of Proposal 2 countered each of these attempts with a specific reform. A 2021 petition to conduct an independently-funded “forensic audit” of 2020 election results, for example, was met with a provision in the ballot measure establishing that only election officials can conduct audits.  

Also on Tuesday, Michigan Democrats gained control of the state government for the first time in nearly 40 years by flipping the state legislature, and they also maintained control of the governorship and state Supreme Court, which may aid the measure’s implementation given Democrats’ broader support for these reforms.

And a candidate who was running to take over election administration in Michigan on a platform of similar conspiracies handily lost on Tuesday in the secretary of state race. (Many other election deniers fared very poorly around the country.)

The fate of some ballot measures remained uncertain as of Thursday. In Arizona, measures to tighten voter ID requirements or make it harder to pass future initiatives were unresolved as of publication, with hundreds of thousands of ballots left to process.

The article has been updated on Nov. 11 with more information about elections in Nevada and San Francisco.

The post The Ballot Measures That Revamped Voting on Tuesday appeared first on Bolts.

In 2017, Seattle implemented a democratic reform that accomplished the seemingly impossible, diversifying and growing the pool of people giving money to political campaigns, and making city races more competitive in the process.

Every local election cycle, Seattle gives each eligible resident four $25 “democracy vouchers” to donate to candidates of their choosing. To opt into the program and receive these vouchers, candidates must agree to certain conditions, like limiting their spending and participating in debates—and most do. 

The program has attracted glowing national attention, but so far no city has capitalized on Seattle’s success to implement its own version. The tide now may be turning as advocates for campaign finance reform hope to bring democracy vouchers to California, with Oakland leading the way. 

On Monday night, the Oakland City Council unanimously voted to place a democracy vouchers referendum on the city’s November ballot, with all six council members present voting aye.

If Oakland voters approve the measure, a new Democracy Dollars program would provide four $25 vouchers for every Oakland voter to donate to eligible city and school board candidates starting in 2024. The referendum on the November ballot also includes other provisions meant to improve campaign finance in the city, including lower campaign contribution limits and new donor disclosure requirements 

The measure is championed by a broad coalition of voting rights groups, including ​​the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, League of Women Voters Oakland, and California Common Cause, as well as community-led organizations that also advocate for immigrant rights, housing development, and preschool education. 

The coalition is making the case that creating a Democracy Dollars program would engage more voters, encourage a more diverse set of candidates, make political giving more transparent, redistribute power to poorer and less white areas, and combat the power of special interests. 

“It gives political giving power to families and neighborhoods that would otherwise have zero disposable income to donate to politicians,” Jonathan Mehta Stein, executive director of California Common Cause, told Bolts.  

At a press conference before the council’s vote, Oakland City Council President Nikki Fortunato Bas echoed that call. “This is a transformative opportunity because it empowers our residents who historically have not participated in elections to select and support candidates who they feel best represent and meet their needs.” 

Reformers in other California cities, especially Los Angeles and San Diego, are closely watching Oakland’s process and hope to follow suit in upcoming years. 

“You see people scrabbling and fighting for every bit of improvement because they want to make a stronger democracy,” said Amy Tobia, a steering committee member of the Voter’s Voice coalition, which is leading the campaign to adopt democracy vouchers in San Diego. 

—

An irony of American elections is that, since the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision, we can make almost limitless political donations, but few of us give at all. Just 1.4 percent of the U.S. population contributed more than $200 to federal candidates, PACs, parties, or outside groups in the 2019-2020 cycle. It’s the same story in local politics. In the cycle before Seattle implemented democracy vouchers, the top 4 percent of political donors donated as much as the bottom 64 percent. Just 391 people—less than 1 percent of adults in the city— accounted for more than quarter of all electoral giving. 

In Oakland, too, the wealthy dominate political giving. Small donors, those giving less than $100, made up just 6 percent of all candidate funding, according to MapLight, a nonpartisan organization that tracks the influence of money in politics. MapLight’s analysis also stresses that the city’s three majority-white zip codes, which house a fifth of the city’s population, were responsible for 45 percent of the contributions made by Oakland residents in the 2020 cycle. Oakland advocates are also alarmed by the increasing amount of money pouring in from outside the city—$1.1 million in 2020, 36 percent of money given to candidates, compared to $231,000 in 2014, 22 percent of the total donations. 

“We have hyper concentrated political giving in the hands of a tiny and totally non-representative slice of Oakland,” says Stein. “The majority of Oakland, which is working class and communities of color, has virtually no political giving power—and that changes who can run for and win, and it changes what ideas are taken seriously.”

To combat the role of private money in elections, fourteen states have implemented one of two public financing programs. The first requires candidates to collect small contributions from a certain number of donors to demonstrate that they have public support. In exchange, they get money from the state. In the second, the government matches private campaign donations, and sometimes increases them by a certain multiplier. In Los Angeles, it’s up to six. In New York City, it’s up to eight. In Maryland, it depends on the size of contribution, with smaller donations getting more of a boost.

Tom Latkowski, cofounder of LA for Democracy Vouchers, a Los Angeles-based organization, and the author of a book on the subject, argues that these programs are ineffective. “Fundamentally, what matching funds do is they move the center of power from the super rich, who can give the maximum contribution limit, to just the very rich,” he told Bolts. “The matching funds do nothing to help the vast majority of Angelenos who aren’t donating at all.” 

Latkowski thinks democracy vouchers are a stronger solution to the problem of concentrated giving because they redistribute political power even to those who don’t have disposable income.  

Every resident is a potential donor under the democracy voucher system. In Seattle, political hopefuls have expanded well beyond traditional fundraising avenues, collecting vouchers at house parties, outside supermarkets, and in housing complexes for low-income seniors. The results have dramatically stretched the boundaries of political donations. 

Since Seattle’s program was implemented, the number of donors per race has gone up by 350 percent, and candidates reported hundreds of thousands more in small donations of under $200, reducing their reliance on a small batch of wealthy donors, according to a study conducted by Alan Griffith, a scholar at the University of Washington. 

The voucher users were also more likely to be young and lower-income contributors compared to cash donors, according to a 2020 study conducted by researchers at Stony Brook and Georgetown Universities, and many of them were new to political contributions. Oakland activists are hoping they can similarly engage residents who are currently disengaged from the process; too many people are “usually pushed to the side,” said liz suk, executive director of Oakland Rising, a non-profit collaborative that’s advocated for the democracy vouchers.

Wayne Barnett, executive director of the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission, the public agency that oversees the city’s voucher program, says voucher use is on the rise and being used by an increasingly diverse pool of residents in the city as people become more familiar with it. Barnett also says the system is fostering a more competitive political environment. “We just had a very contentious selection season, and we didn’t have that before,” he told Bolts. 

Since 2015, the number of city candidates in Seattle has nearly doubled. In addition, the margins of victory have been lower, and turnout has increased. Proponents of the vouchers program attribute these shifts to the reform, pointing out that it allows candidates without personal wealth or access to affluent donors to fundraise enough to run viable campaigns and to interest more voters.

An example is Teresa Mosqueda, a former labor organizer who ran for council in 2017 on a platform of affordable housing. She launched her campaign while working full time, renting a one-bedroom apartment, and still paying off student loans. 

She said the democracy vouchers program, and the knowledge it gave her that she would have access to small donor contributions, pushed her to run. “That really was a green light saying go,” she told Vox in 2018. “If I was out door-belling in the evening for three hours or so, I could walk away with $500, $600, even $700 in vouchers on my own.” In total, Mosqueda received nearly $300,000 from democracy vouchers.

Mosqueda won her race in 2017 and ran for another term in 2021. She opted into the democracy voucher program again, collected over 10,000 vouchers, worth more than $250,000, and won re-election. 

Seattle’s current mayor, city attorney, and seven of the nine city councilors used the program for either their latest primary, general election, or both. 

—

In Oakland, activists told Bolts, the push for democracy vouchers picked up in part out of frustration over recent school board races. In 2016, billionaire Michael Bloomberg gave $300,000 to the political action committee sponsored by an Oakland-based nonprofit that supports charter schools. That group then spent $153,000 in support of a pro-charter candidate, who won his race. Two years later, the committee spent a similar sum, and again its candidate won. And in 2020, pro-charter groups poured more than $1 million into the Oakland School Board Director election. They won three of the four races. 

More broadly, during the last four elections in Oakland, 77 percent of the contested races were won by the candidate who raised the most, according to MapLight. 

A few years ago, groups like Common Cause California and the League of Women Voters Oakland began discussing the idea of democracy dollars, but the proponents aren’t just “the usual suspects on money in politics,” says Stein. “We are working together with organizations that represent a diverse set of Oakland communities that are closer to the issues that these communities are facing,” like the Asian Law Caucus, Oakland Rising, and the ACLU. 

That group gained allies like Dan Kalb, a city councilmember, and Nikki Fortunato Bas, the City Council President, who pushed for the vote this week. 

“It’s really only a few million dollars a year to be able to highlight and expand our democratic values of our democratic system for local elections,” said Kalb during a press conference before the vote. “And I think that’s a small price to pay.” 

Now that the council has placed the issue on the ballot, proponents must educate and convince voters. “It takes some time to explain the idea,” says Stein. “But once it’s explained, people have a universally positive reaction to it.” 

The Oakland measure is different from Seattle’s in several ways. For one, it applies to more offices, including school board races, a choice by local advocates who designed the measure that reflects the city’s recent political history. 

Under the legislation, vouchers would automatically be mailed to registered voters in Oakland, and anyone over 18 who’s been a resident in the city for 30 days or more could request them.  

Oakland’s bill would also use a different funding source. Seattle’s program cost nearly $5.5 million over 2019-2020, money that is coming from a property tax that voters approved alongside the democracy voucher program in 2015. For a $450,000 property, it costs about $9 per year. In Oakland, the cost of $2 million a year will be funded from the general fund. suk says advocates pushed for this to not “burden our homeowners.”

Democracy vouchers have come with their pushback, controversy, and limitations. The Stranger, a Seattle publication, recently reported on a canvasser who was accused of deceptively marketing blank vouchers. Instead of explaining that signing the paper would give money to a candidate, he portrayed it as a way to “help the homeless.” 

Barnett says the commission is considering banning for-profit voucher gatherers. For residents who may be worried about fraud, the Seattle program offers a searchable database of all the democracy vouchers redeemed by candidates. 

California advocates hope that Oakland’s vote snowballs across the rest of the state. Organizers are now debating how they want to get the measure on the ballot for voter approval in Los Angeles, San Jose, San Diego, Fresno, and Orange County by 2024. Collecting signatures is time- and labor-intensive, but going through the city council can be politically risky, says Tobia, the San Diego advocate.

“You’re asking the people for whom the current system has worked very well to make it more accessible to others, and that’s a big ask,” she says. 

Still, advocates think that democracy vouchers could be similar to another reform that started slowly at the local level and then accelerated. “I see democracy vouchers as maybe 10 or 15 years behind ranked choice voting,” said Latkowski, in reference to a change in election procedures that just in recent years has swept Alaska, Maine, Utah, and New York City.

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