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. 

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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. 

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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.

The post In California Cities, a New Frontier for Public Financing of Elections appeared first on Bolts.

Most cities finalized their 2021 budgets last year in the usual way, with mayors, city managers, and council or commission members hashing out the details. But in Seattle, residents will get to decide over the coming months how to spend millions of dollars that would otherwise go to the police department.

In the wake of protests against the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and so many other Black people, a movement to defund police departments has taken shape across the country. Last year, organizers in many cities created “people’s budgets” that showed how officials could cut police funding and invest in housing, health care, and other social services. 

Few cities cut police department budgets in response to public pressure, but of those that did, Seattle went a step further in November by allocating $30 million to a participatory budgeting process that will give everyday people a say in how the money should be used. Twelve million dollars was directly diverted from the Seattle Police Department, while the remaining $18 million comes from Mayor Jenny Durkan’s Equitable Communities Initiative Fund, which is sourced from cuts to several departments and new taxes.

“Those closest to the problems are closest to the solutions,” reads a statement signed by 75 local organizations that advocated for what they call a solidarity budget. “Black, brown, Indigenous, and immigrant communities are most harmed by COVID-19, climate injustice, racism, and criminalization, and should be central to the process of transforming Seattle’s budget into one that serves all people.”  

Throughout the summer and fall of 2020, the groups called for a budget that divests from policing and uses participatory budgeting—a governance model with roots in Brazil—to invest in “priorities that can generate true public health and safety for all Seattle residents.”

“That really put forward a strong vision for the city that could then be strengthened and reiterated by folks who were marching and protesting, who were having meetings with their [elected officials] and seeking to hold folks accountable,” said Kristania De Leon, the director of partnerships and strategy at the Participatory Budgeting Project, a national organization that supports local campaigns. 

Two coalitions in particular, King County Equity Now and Decriminalize Seattle, worked to channel momentum from the streets into the city’s budgeting process, demanding that the City Council defund the Seattle Police Department by at least 50 percent and “reinvest that money into Black communities and toward community-led health and safety systems.”

“It was just a good combination of having the policy demands prepared, at the moment when the social movement opportunity provided us that opening. But without the movement on the ground, this wouldn’t have happened,” said Angélica Cházaro, an organizer with Decriminalize Seattle and assistant professor at the University of Washington School of Law.

On Nov. 23, after an eight-week series of City Council meetings, more than 160 amendments, and vetoes by Mayor Jenny Durkan, the final budget announced by Councilmember Teresa Mosqueda, chairperson of the Budget Committee, included an 18 percent cut to the police department, a portion of which was reallocated to participatory budgeting. 

“As we have throughout this spring and summer, we led with investments in our BIPOC community and support for our most vulnerable families and small businesses,” said Mosqueda in a media release. The budget also includes an agreement to reassess the participatory budgeting plan monthly and potentially increase the pot of funding. 

The concept for participatory budgeting was cemented in the 1980s by the Brazilian Workers’ Party, which sought to push past the electoral process and envision new ways of practicing democracy. In the U.S., participatory budgeting was piloted in 2009 when residents of Chicago’s 49th Ward demanded greater transparency about how the city was spending public funds. The interest in Chicago inspired residents in other cities like San Francisco and New York City to organize community-led budgeting projects. 

In 2019, New Yorkers participated in planning and voted on $39 million in projects in 32 City Council districts across the city, which has been one of the largest-scale participatory budgeting programs in the U.S. to date. Improvements to parks, libraries, public housing, and transportation are some of the things that participatory budgeting has funded. (The process was canceled in 2020 because of the coronavirus outbreak, but has been revived this year in some districts.)

Participatory budgeting is part of a global movement for solidarity economies, says Natalia Linares, communications organizer for the New Economy Coalition. The vision for the solidarity economy movement “also includes other elements like building the movement for worker owned cooperatives, building the movement for community land trusts, [and] permanently affordable housing,” she said. The Movement For Black Lives has also included participatory budgeting in its platform as part of a broader vision for community control of laws, institutions, and policies.

The idea of participatory budgeting came to fruition in Seattle during its 2015 Youth Voice, Youth Choice program that allowed young residents to give their input for neighborhood-level projects. Since 2017, all residents have had the opportunity to vote on improvements to streets, sidewalks, and parks. 

“I think one of the things that helped is that City Council members … were familiar with the idea of [participatory budgeting], it wasn’t completely new to them,” said Cházaro. But those earlier iterations have involved allocating just a few million dollars and were limited to projects carried out by the Seattle Department of Neighborhoods, the Department of Transportation, and Parks and Recreation. Now, the pot of money is tens of times bigger and comes from a general fund, meaning it can be used for projects, and also ongoing programs, within most city departments. 

King County Equity Now is doing research that will inform how the participatory budgeting process will actually play out. Cházaro said they intend to involve community groups from across the city, including many Black-led organizations that have been fighting for racial justice for a long time. “This [activism] is built on … years and years of abolitionist organizing in Seattle,” she said.

The group reported that it has put together a team of more than 100 community-based researchers, “including youth, elders, people with different levels of experience in the criminal legal system, artists, healers, [and] educators].” Members of this research team are conducting online surveys (which are available in multiple languages) and in-person conversations in communities of color to identify needs and potential barriers to individuals getting involved in participatory budgeting.

“The deep history, rich legacy and strength of Black organizing in this region helped lay the foundation for much of this work,” a King County Equity Now spokesperson said in an email.

Their goal is to come up with strategies to make the process accessible to as many people as possible, including those experiencing homelessness and housing instability, people with disabilities, and formerly incarcerated people. They are also figuring out how to create an online participation system to ensure safety during the COVID-19 pandemic, which may require strategies for making internet access more widely available. Cházaro highlighted that organizers in Seattle “fought for money for Black-led research to inform participatory budgeting,” and ultimately received $3 million for this planning stage. 

Some local reporters have cast doubt on the effectiveness of the research and raised questions about how the money is being spent. Tammy Morales, the council member working directly with King County Equity Now, did not respond to a request for comment from The Appeal: Political Report in time for publication, but in December she rebuked a skeptical blogger, saying in an email that “Contracts which have predated this one haven’t received the same kind of scrutiny you’re offering here. So, I find it interesting that this particular contract has received so much attention from the onset.” 

Morales added that, “Participatory research is about building the capacity of our neighbors to understand what’s happening in their community and to increase civic engagement so they can inform future policy-making…To suggest that a greater standard or threshold is in order is to dismiss the people who stand to benefit most from this approach.”

In a presentation last month, organizers spoke about forming a steering committee made up of community members who will collaborate with multiple city departments to create a strategy for the participatory budgeting process based on this initial research. The process will include reviewing community-generated proposals, and creating a list of projects and programs that could receive funding, which community members will then vote on.

De Leon from the Participatory Budgeting Project said that the goal is not to create one-time projects and hope that sustained equity will come out of that; this is just one step that’s part of a larger vision of justice. “We’re looking at this as a system’s change. And it needs to be a long term, deep commitment.”

This story has been updated to include a comment from King County Equity Now.

This article was produced in partnership with Just Media, a national hub supporting young writers covering justice issues.

The post Seattle Cut Its Police Budget. Now the Public Will Decide How To Spend the Money. appeared first on Bolts.