Westneat: Best laid plans fail to stem big money’s tide

What Yang’s talking about was Initiative 122, which Seattle voters approved in 2015 as an experiment in public financing of elections. Through a property tax, it gives every Seattle voter $100 worth of “democracy vouchers” to give to candidates. It also lowered contribution limits and capped campaign spending.

The total effect was supposed to be as described in the 2015 voters guide: “Powerful special interests are spending record amounts to influence elections … I-122 keeps Seattle of, by and for the people.”

Yet there has never been a Seattle City Council election so dominated by special interests, big businesses and the superwealthy as this year. Outside influence PACs — mostly business and labor — have raised more money to pour into the 2019 council elections than was spent by outside committees in all previous council races combined, going back to 1995 (that’s as far back as the city’s online records go).

The result is a crazy quilt of campaign ads and themes, some of which aren’t true (such as flyers with homeless tents Photoshopped into parks). And none of which is controlled or sanctioned by the candidates themselves.

Are democracy vouchers to blame?

All told, nine PACs have already raised $3.7 million for the council races (compared to about $2 million donated so far in democracy vouchers from the people). The most spent by independent expenditure groups on council races before these new rules was $784,000, in 2015.

Is the democracy-voucher system to blame for this? Hard to say — this special-interest money bomb might have exploded anyway. But some experts say the contribution and spending caps in I-122, designed to restrict money’s influence, perversely led special interests to seek a workaround.

“Seattle’s limits on contributions do not restrict how much people can give to electoral efforts; they simply require people to send their contributions to less responsible and more destructive speakers,” Albert Alschuler, a University of Chicago law professor, wrote in a recent letter to Seattle election commissioners. “It’s unfortunate that Seattle now has a system of campaign financing that actively channels funds toward less responsible speech.”

So where does this leave us? Alschuler says Seattle now ought to cap special-interest PAC donations, before they overwhelm everything. Councilmember M. Lorena Gonzalez has proposed a $5,000 cap, but there’s concern it may not be constitutional.

But for this year, get ready for a fall political mud storm, maybe like we’ve never seen in local politics. For now, we’re stuck with it — hoisted, it seems, by our own liberal petard.