Recent Seattle elections have produced diverse councils. This is not due to STV or proportional electoral schemes. But apparently a more politicized culture and a more visible divide between classes.
By 2019 two political groups had emerged -
- the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce's political action committee Civic Alliance for a Sound Economy (CASE), of councillors and the
- Civic Alliance for a Progressive Economy (CAPE) of Kshama Sawant and others.
A major dividing point was the city council's passage of a law forcing financial obligation on local large corporations (Amazon) to support affordable housing. This inaccurately named "head tax" required businesses grossing at least $20 million to pay $275 per employee annually in order to fund affordable housing programs for homeless people. Business's CASE spent $1.8M fighting it, $200,000 from Amazon alone. (If only that money had gone to affordable housing!) Seven out of the nine council members backed down and voted to repeal the tax. Sawant and Teresa Mosqueda voted against repeal (and were re-elected).
But the very fact the tax was once passed - and the continuing presence on council of persons such as Kshama Sawant and Mosqueda - leads one to suspect that something very different is going on at the Seattle city hall.
But how did it happen?
Although Seattle's political system is unusual in many ways, it does nothing to produce proportional representation, to increase minority representation.
Seattle has the mayor-council system. (In contrast, Edmonton has the council-manager system. Our mayor is part of council.)
In Seattle, the mayor is not on council but is head of the executive branch of city government. The city council, led by a Council President, is the "legislative branch" of the city government. (This is same system used in New York City.)
Seven of the councillors are elected in wards; two are elected at-large. The two at-large seats are filled in separate contests. Thus there is not a multi-member contest, a prerequisite for any proportional electoral system.
Majoritarian city council elections
Each seat is filled by a runoff process that ensures majority representation within each ward.
Each seat is filled in two-step process - a primary election is held in August, with the two most popular candidates going on to a general election in November. In the November election, one or the other of the two takes a majority of the votes. (STV would of course eliminate the need to hold two separate elections.)
Perhaps the way the runoff elections eliminate vote splitting leads to a wider range of candidates running and voters casting votes in the primary to those whom they might not under a straight FPTP system.
The presence of write-in ballots is another departure from the usual voting schemes used in Canada.
The career of Kshama Sawant, of the Socialist Alternative movement, might be the result of loosening of the usual voting stranglehold.
The runoff scheme did little for her - in 2013 and 2015 she received a majority of the primary vote before winning a seat by majority vote in the "general election" of November. In 2019 she was the leading candidate in the primary (with 37 percent of the vote) and went on to win a seat with a majority of the vote.
Write-in ballots
Sawant's run for the Washington State House of Representatives in 2012, the start of her electoral career, though did show an unusually effective application of a different sort of loosening. Under U.S. laws, a voter may "write in" the name of a person he or she would like to vote for even if not listed on the ballot. Sawant was not listed on the ballot but so many wrote in her name that she came in second on the primary vote and went on to the "general election," where she fell short.
But this visibility, and the fact that her supporters could come out of the woodwork to actually see how many of them they are, meant that when the city council election came around the following year, she had the confidence to run and they had the confidence to vote for her. And she won.
2015 Seattle election
Sawant advanced through the primary election for City Council District 3 representative on August 4, 2015 with 52 percent of the vote, a majority of the vote and far ahead of the other four contenders.
She then was re-elected, in the November "general election". She received 17,170 votes compared to 13,427 for Banks, or 56 percent to 44 percent.
Sawant is the first socialist on the Seattle City Council since A.W. Piper, elected in 1877. (For more information on this 19th Century socialist, see his Wikipedia page. Note that he lived in Victoria, BC in the early 1870s!) Piper, later consdiered one of Seattle's most influential citizens, was elected back when Seattle elected through wards, a couple multi-seat (probably electing through Block Voting), and one or two single-seat things, electing through FPTP.
From 1910 to 2013, Seattle elected its councillors in separate contests, although all were elected in a single at-large district. (This scheme allowed a single voting block to take all the seats.)
Since 1916, a few socialists and Communists have been elected in Seattle. Author, journalist and world traveller Anna Louise Strong was elected to the School Board in 1916. Hugh De Lacy, a Communist, served on the council 1937 to 1940. (He was later elected to the U.S. Congress during WWII.)
Diversity on Seattle's council
Incumbent Mike O'Brien, elected to District 6, and leftist Lisa Herbold, elected to District 1, and Sawant became a progressive bloc on Council.
As well, Debora Juarez and others (later endorsed by the business election committee CASE) were elected.
The 2016-2019 Council was majority female. Women councillors were Sawant, Sally Bagshaw, Lisa Herbold, Debora Juarez and Lorena González, five out of nine.
Sawant was one of four people of color on the new Council, with five being of European stock.
Thus the 2016-2019 was a diverse Council.
Seattle's recent electoral reform
It was perhaps coincidental that this diverse council is the result of the first time members were at least partially elected by wards in more than 100 years. I say it may be coincidental because certainly FPTP contests in single-member wards do little for diversity in Edmonton today.
But the Seattle councils, elected through runoff FPTP district elections since 2015, are far more mixed and diverse than that elected in Edmonton when it filled seats through Block Voting in at-large elections, and is perhaps more diverse than the councils Seattle had when the largest block in the city could - and probably often did - elect the winner in each and every of the separate contests, taking all the city-wide seats.
Too bad though that Seattle had not simply retained the old at-large district, put all the separate contests together to make one multi-member contest, and ensured the strength and effectiveness of the vote by having each voter cast only one in total (instead of one in each of several separate contests).
Those changes would have produced Single Non-Transferable Voting, which would have ensured mixed roughly proportional representation. If the votes were transferable (ranked choice voting), STV would have been produced.
Either of these options would have produced more representational city councils, instead of the now-current district by district electioneering. The present system deprives the minority in each geographical district of any representation at all. Although the run-off system reduces wastage compared to simple FPTP, still often 45 to 30 percent of the votes in each district are wasted, a larger amount than would be wasted under STV.
Perhaps New York's upcoming move to use Alternative Voting will lead both it and Seattle to move to STV eventually. I wonder how Sawant feels about that.
Sawant interviewed
Sawant did not mention electoral reform in this interview she gave in 2019.
Kshama Sawant was interviewed during her re-election bid in 2019:
(excerpt from info on the Ballotpedia website)
What would be your top three priorities, if elected? 1) We need universal rent control, free of corporate loopholes. In cities like San Francisco and New York, rent control has been a lifeline for working people. In addition, we need to tax Amazon and big business to build tens of thousands of high quality, affordable. social owned housing as an alternative to the for-profit market, which has failed us.
2) Seattle should lead nationally on the Green New Deal, becoming 100% renewable by 2030. Tax the rich to expand mass transit, making it free and electric. Create thousands of good union jobs expanding wind and solar, and retrofitting buildings to the highest efficiency standards.
3) Build the movement against sexism, sexual violence, and workplace discrimination. Establish an elected, independent office to investigate workplace sexual and gender harassment, with real teeth. End the gender pay gap, starting with a pay audit of big corporations in Seattle.
What areas of public policy are you personally passionate about? As a member of the American Federation of Teachers Local 1789, I am most passionate about being an unapologetic, socialist voice for working class people in Seattle. As a city councilmember, I’ve fought tirelessly over the last five years to represent working people and help bring your voices into Seattle City Hall. I helped build the movement that made Seattle the first major city to win a $15 minimum wage.
My office has helped win a series of landmark renters rights victories and millions for affordable housing. Working with indigenous activists, my office ushered in the Indigenous People’s Day, ending Columbus Day. Every year my office organizes the People’s Budget movement, and through grassroots organizing in coalition with other progressive organizations, have won millions in additional funding for social services.
This year’s city elections will be a referendum on who runs Seattle - Amazon and big business or working people. That is why Seattle's biggest businesses have amassed over $1 million so far in corporate PACs ($200,000 from Amazon alone), and are disproportionately focusing that money on our election in Seattle’s District 3.
Meanwhile, our campaign is “not for sale” - entirely funded by donations from working people, and as always doesn’t accept a dime in corporate cash.
I only take the average wage ($40,000) of District 3 residents and donate the rest of my six-figure City Council salary to social justice movements.
The single biggest challenge for District 3, and for Seattle as a whole, is the acute affordable housing and homelessness crisis.
At this point, a majority of working people are being adversely affected, and people of color and the LGBTQ community are disproportionately impacted. Tens of thousands of renters are extremely rent-burdened (paying more than half their income on rent), and therefore, are vulnerable to being made homeless. We also have chronic under-funding of homeless services, mental health services, youth jobs, public education.
The last decade shows the for-profit housing market has failed us. Seattle has had the nation’s largest number of construction cranes four years running, yet the crisis of affordable housing remains among the worst in the country, with the average one-bedroom rent now over two thousand dollars a month. Studies show that when the average rent in a metropolitan area increases by $100, homelessness increases by at least 15%, often higher. We need universal rent control to stop Seattle’s skyrocketing rents and hemorrhaging of affordable housing.
We also need a massive expansion of social housing - publicly-owned, high quality, permanently affordable housing.
I was a proud fighter for the Amazon Tax in Seattle, and opposed its shameful repeal when Mayor Durkan and seven of the nine council members capitulated to Amazon and big business, and reversed this progressive tax less than a month after it was unanimously passed.
As a member of Socialist Alternative, I wear the badge of socialist with honor, and I’m excited to see candidates identifying as socialists like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez winning elections across the country.
This shows that millions of Americans are looking for a different kind of politics, based on the needs of working people and the environment, not the interests of the billionaire class and big business.
I think a key part of that process is building a new political party completely independent of corporate money, that fights un-apologetically for working people and the oppressed, and is rooted in social movements, community organizations, and labor unions.
I hope you will join me in the struggle for a democratic socialist society — a society based on cooperation and solidarity, run democratically by and for working people, where everyone can work and live in dignity."
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Well said.
Kshama Sawant was re-elected in 2019 and currently sits on the Seattle city council, the legislative body of that city's government.
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Thanks for reading.
Check out my blog "List of Montopedia blogs concerning electoral reform" to find other blogs on this important subject.
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This year is the:
* 100th Anniversary of United Farmers of Alberta party being elected on promise to bring in electoral reform, a promise fulfilled three years later.
* 50th anniversary of the last STV city election in Canada. Calgary elected 14 city councillors through STV, and then switched to FPTP for city elections. By that time, more than 54 years after the first STV city election, anyone old enough to have voted using X voting in a city election would have had to be 75 years old.
* 50th Anniversary of election of Lougheed's Progressive-Conservatives. With only 46 percent of the vote they took more than 60 percent of the seats. NDP received 11 percent of the vote but elected just one (Grant Notley), instead of the nine MLAs it was due.
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What is STV?
From a 1902 reform magazine:
"Thinking it well to have in every number something by way of a brief explanation of proportional voting, I repeat in this number the following. Proportional representation means the use of a reasonable and scientific system of voting instead of the present stupid, unfair and inefficient procedure.
Methods: There are several systems by which the principle of proportional representation may be given effect to. Large electoral districts, each electing several members, are a necessary feature. The "quota" plan is usually employed. It means that a quota of the votes elects one representative. To arrive at the quota, the number of valid votes cast is divided by the number of seats to be filled. For instance in a seven-member district any one-seventh of the voters could elect one representative and the other six-sevenths could not interfere with their choice.
The three principal systems of proportional representation are
the Free List as used in Switzerland and Belgium [party-list pro-rep],
the Hare system as used in Tasmania [STV], and
the Gove System as advocated in Massachusetts.
The Preferential Vote [Alternative Voting/Instant Run-off Voting] -- This is used in the election of single officers such as a mayor. It is not strictly a form of pro-rep but is akin thereto, and uses part of the same voting methods. The object of preferential voting is to encourage the free nomination of candidates and to obtain always a clear majority at one balloting, no matter how many candidates are nominated."
(From the Proportional Representation Review Dec. 1902, p. 77) (Hathi Trust online resource, page 81/180)
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