Local Politics
Elections are tomorrow, and in Seattle, we've got a couple of very interesting races, and for those of you who don't live around here, a couple of very interesting electoral features that really ought to be more widely adopted.
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First, off, we have 100% mail-in ballots. Everyone gets ballots and voter guides mailed to them a few weeks in advance. We can mail them in by election day, or physically stick them in dropboxes, or do it the old-fashioned way and go to one of the "vote in person" locations. The result being: no in-person voter suppression, no misdirection about voting locations, no surprise day-of-election id requirements, no worrying about taking time away from work to vote, no huge lines, no untrustworthy electronic voting machines, online verification that your voter information is correct, online verification that your ballot was mailed to you, online verification that your ballot was received, and online verification that your ballot was counted. And much higher voter turnout. Snail mail is the wave of the future.
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Second, we have a jungle, er, top-two primary. Every single frickin' candidate gets to run in the primary election, and specify whatever party affiliation they want to. And the top two vote-getters go on to the general election. The organized political parties are treated precisely the same as any other organization, from for-profit corporations to unions to non-profit advocacy groups - the candidate can put "Endorsed by the WA State ____ Party" in their voter guide statement, just like they'd say "Endorsed by the 53rd District Firefighters". This is a wonderful, wonderful system, because it means that, in districts that skew in a particular direction, people can still make a choice between two viable candidates in the general election. I'm in a very left-wing location, and the two most interesting races involve two left-wing candidates, as opposed to the "normal" situation, which would be a Democratic party candidate who is assured of victory no matter how regressive some of their positions are, and a Republican candidate who is assured of defeat no matter how liberal they actually are in practice.
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(As an aside: the Republican party talks a lot about the virtues of federalism and decentralization, and yet it seems that one of the things crippling them the most is their insistence on a homogenous nation-wide ideology, with no room for state-level or local-level experimentation. Republicans from urban Seattle are under pressure to conform to the same views as Republicans from rural Texas, and that just seems self-defeating. Not that the Democratic party doesn't do this, but at least from my perspective, it seems like a much less systematic and organized effect, which is mainly still driven by individual interest groups. Of course, that may just mean that much of the Republican leadership actually drank their own Kool-aid, whereas the Democratic leadership has largely held themselves aloof from such plebeian concerns.)
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The first of the awesome races is for Seattle City Council Position No. 2, where the incumbent Democrat Richard Conlin is being challenged by Kshama Sawant, who teaches economics at Seattle Central Community College and is running under the banner of the Socialist Alternative Party. This is awesome, she is awesome, and I really want her to get elected. A caveat is that I probably would not be happy if the entire government was composed of her ideological clones, but as with libertarian candidates, I think her positions are far less represented than they should be. Her presence in the race has already gotten other candidates to take seriously the idea of a $15 minimum wage; I'd initially thought this was a bad idea, but I dug around and found some economic studies that indicate that it actually doesn't have a noticeable negative effect on prices or employment rates. The reason seems to be that the people who would be paid more are in turn more likely to spend that extra money in the local economy, thus increasing the local velocity of money and making more people wealthier. (There are some weird parallels between money and electricity, that I am still scratching my head over.) Basically, trickle-up economics.
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The second of the awesome races is for Seattle's Mayor. Four years ago, Mike McGinn became mayor after running as a complete outsider, never before elected to public office, and defeating the incumbent in the primary and the annointed corporate tool replacement in the general election. Since then, it seems like the establishment has been trying to undermine him at every turn, and engaging in hypocritical games such as refusing to work with him and then claiming that it's he's impossible to work with. So he'd already have my vote from a screw-the-establishment perspective. Plus, McGinn actually paid attention to the Environmental Impact Statement about the big tunnel, and actually changed his position based on the new evidence! (Yes, that's a shock. Updating conclusions based on new data? Clearly he's not a career politician.) While Ed Murray was part of the effort to stick Seattle City with responsibility for any cost overruns. But more than that was a part of one of the last debates between McGinn and the Democratic challenger Ed Murray:
http://www.king5.com/news/politics/Seattle-Mayoral-Debate-McGinn-vs-Murray---Part-3-of-3-227145631.html
7:45 - question to McGinn
8:20 - answer from McGinn
9:40 - response from Murray
10:48 - question to Murray
10:55 - answer from Murray
11:22 - response from McGinn
11:55 - time is up
The subject is the federal Department of Justice civil-rights investigation into racially biased policing and excessive use of force by Seattle City police. The federal government has imposed a settlement on the city to help fix this, and apparently a lot of people in the city government find this to be embarrassing and unwelcome. Ed Murray was forced to admit that he "probably" doesn't have any objection to the final settlement that McGinn worked out, and that his worry is that "this could go on for years and years", and he wants to expedite us getting out from it. To which McGinn's response was:
"You know, and that really reflects his attitude, Senator Murray's attitude towards the consent decree. 'We've let it linger for years and years, we've got to get out from under it'. This is an opportunity to fix something. I've heard Senator Murray say it's embarrassing we have a consent decree; it's embarrassing we had complaints of police brutality from our communities of color for twenty years and we didn't *do* anything about it. *That* was embarrassing. It should take as much time as it takes to get it right."
So yes, that's pretty much my impressions of them in a nutshell.
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And finally, in case you were feeling lazy, here's a link to the Stranger's voter's guide, which is, well, much less biased and manipulative than that of the other major local papers. :)
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/the-stranger-election-control-board-voters-guide/Content?oid=17961723
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First, off, we have 100% mail-in ballots. Everyone gets ballots and voter guides mailed to them a few weeks in advance. We can mail them in by election day, or physically stick them in dropboxes, or do it the old-fashioned way and go to one of the "vote in person" locations. The result being: no in-person voter suppression, no misdirection about voting locations, no surprise day-of-election id requirements, no worrying about taking time away from work to vote, no huge lines, no untrustworthy electronic voting machines, online verification that your voter information is correct, online verification that your ballot was mailed to you, online verification that your ballot was received, and online verification that your ballot was counted. And much higher voter turnout. Snail mail is the wave of the future.
---
Second, we have a jungle, er, top-two primary. Every single frickin' candidate gets to run in the primary election, and specify whatever party affiliation they want to. And the top two vote-getters go on to the general election. The organized political parties are treated precisely the same as any other organization, from for-profit corporations to unions to non-profit advocacy groups - the candidate can put "Endorsed by the WA State ____ Party" in their voter guide statement, just like they'd say "Endorsed by the 53rd District Firefighters". This is a wonderful, wonderful system, because it means that, in districts that skew in a particular direction, people can still make a choice between two viable candidates in the general election. I'm in a very left-wing location, and the two most interesting races involve two left-wing candidates, as opposed to the "normal" situation, which would be a Democratic party candidate who is assured of victory no matter how regressive some of their positions are, and a Republican candidate who is assured of defeat no matter how liberal they actually are in practice.
---
(As an aside: the Republican party talks a lot about the virtues of federalism and decentralization, and yet it seems that one of the things crippling them the most is their insistence on a homogenous nation-wide ideology, with no room for state-level or local-level experimentation. Republicans from urban Seattle are under pressure to conform to the same views as Republicans from rural Texas, and that just seems self-defeating. Not that the Democratic party doesn't do this, but at least from my perspective, it seems like a much less systematic and organized effect, which is mainly still driven by individual interest groups. Of course, that may just mean that much of the Republican leadership actually drank their own Kool-aid, whereas the Democratic leadership has largely held themselves aloof from such plebeian concerns.)
---
The first of the awesome races is for Seattle City Council Position No. 2, where the incumbent Democrat Richard Conlin is being challenged by Kshama Sawant, who teaches economics at Seattle Central Community College and is running under the banner of the Socialist Alternative Party. This is awesome, she is awesome, and I really want her to get elected. A caveat is that I probably would not be happy if the entire government was composed of her ideological clones, but as with libertarian candidates, I think her positions are far less represented than they should be. Her presence in the race has already gotten other candidates to take seriously the idea of a $15 minimum wage; I'd initially thought this was a bad idea, but I dug around and found some economic studies that indicate that it actually doesn't have a noticeable negative effect on prices or employment rates. The reason seems to be that the people who would be paid more are in turn more likely to spend that extra money in the local economy, thus increasing the local velocity of money and making more people wealthier. (There are some weird parallels between money and electricity, that I am still scratching my head over.) Basically, trickle-up economics.
---
The second of the awesome races is for Seattle's Mayor. Four years ago, Mike McGinn became mayor after running as a complete outsider, never before elected to public office, and defeating the incumbent in the primary and the annointed corporate tool replacement in the general election. Since then, it seems like the establishment has been trying to undermine him at every turn, and engaging in hypocritical games such as refusing to work with him and then claiming that it's he's impossible to work with. So he'd already have my vote from a screw-the-establishment perspective. Plus, McGinn actually paid attention to the Environmental Impact Statement about the big tunnel, and actually changed his position based on the new evidence! (Yes, that's a shock. Updating conclusions based on new data? Clearly he's not a career politician.) While Ed Murray was part of the effort to stick Seattle City with responsibility for any cost overruns. But more than that was a part of one of the last debates between McGinn and the Democratic challenger Ed Murray:
http://www.king5.com/news/politics/Seattle-Mayoral-Debate-McGinn-vs-Murray---Part-3-of-3-227145631.html
7:45 - question to McGinn
8:20 - answer from McGinn
9:40 - response from Murray
10:48 - question to Murray
10:55 - answer from Murray
11:22 - response from McGinn
11:55 - time is up
The subject is the federal Department of Justice civil-rights investigation into racially biased policing and excessive use of force by Seattle City police. The federal government has imposed a settlement on the city to help fix this, and apparently a lot of people in the city government find this to be embarrassing and unwelcome. Ed Murray was forced to admit that he "probably" doesn't have any objection to the final settlement that McGinn worked out, and that his worry is that "this could go on for years and years", and he wants to expedite us getting out from it. To which McGinn's response was:
"You know, and that really reflects his attitude, Senator Murray's attitude towards the consent decree. 'We've let it linger for years and years, we've got to get out from under it'. This is an opportunity to fix something. I've heard Senator Murray say it's embarrassing we have a consent decree; it's embarrassing we had complaints of police brutality from our communities of color for twenty years and we didn't *do* anything about it. *That* was embarrassing. It should take as much time as it takes to get it right."
So yes, that's pretty much my impressions of them in a nutshell.
---
And finally, in case you were feeling lazy, here's a link to the Stranger's voter's guide, which is, well, much less biased and manipulative than that of the other major local papers. :)
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/the-stranger-election-control-board-voters-guide/Content?oid=17961723