#seaelex

They see Mike trollin’, they hatiiiiiiiin’.

Well well well. Mike McGinn, former Mayor of Seattle and Guy Who Was Right About The Tunnel, gave everyone a heart attack this morning with his announcement that he’d be running for Mayor again.

McGinn’s legacy is a bit murky; faced with a hostile Council made of largely of crispy white folks and a weird economic time for the City (because like 2009 was kiiiiiind of rough around here), lots of casual observers blamed many of the City’s troubles on him. 

However, he also gave us prepaid parking to reduce drunk driving, a library levy that extended service, and a healthy revenue stream for infrastructure, arts, and neighborhoods. He capped towing fees (which were previously outrageously unregulated), opened the Office of Immigrant & Refugee Affairs, is responsible for both the Rainier Beach Community Center and 12th Ave. Arts, and he invested oodles of cash in school road safety improvements.

Plus, he fought hard for later bar close hours, municipal internet, and to extend the Broadway/First Hill street car. 

So yeah, he did get quite a bit of stuff done. And people liked him a lot. And he might have been able to do a lot more with more allies on the Council than just Mike O’Brien. 

However, his first race against Murray was difficult; Murray made a lot of promises to powerful communities (like the nightlife crew) to sway votes, and collected big revenue from Comcast to fund his campaign. 

Now that Murray is looking less bulletproof, McGinn is back in the race. We’re not sure if that means he’s just trying to open the door for someone else or if he really, really wants the job again, but it’ll be interesting to see what kind of a tone he takes. His campaign slogan is...not ideal...

Image: McGinn’s slogan, “Keep Seattle,” which feels...a little icky

Did you put your Democracy Vouchers on your fridge like a good little angel? Does the Mayor’s race have you thinking about where you might like to spend them?

Too bad, you can’t spend them on the Mayoral race! But you should still know where you can spend them and there’s one clear and very official site that can tell you: the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission site.

Yes, yes, I know. So wonky! But seriously, this is a primary source for elections information and there’s lots of good stuff there so you really should check it. 

The SEEC homepage can direct you to all kinds of infomation—including the designated Democracy Voucher info hub! But if you check real quick into who’s actually filed to run, you can easily see who’s qualified for the program and who isn’t. Just go to the “Campaigns” tab...

And you’ll see that all of the qualified candidates (all three of them!) are marked with an asterisk. 

You can also use the SEEC site to look at current and past campaign finance information to find out who’s dropping coin in which races. 

We’re living in strange times, darling dears. 

Coasting through the SEEC filings in the Mayoral and City Council races has revealed the usual candidates from the Batcrackers Party—chiefly, Alex Tsimerman, but also musician Keith Whiteman—and a few earnest newcomers, like Andres Salomon. There’s also community activist and attorney Nikita Oliver (who hasn’t filed any donation information yet) who’s running to the far left on most issues. 

Then there’s some other person called Casey Carlisle who is running as a libertarian and appears to be non-existent but very opinionated. 

Carlisle’s site, which resembles a WordPress blog from 2005, actively doesn’t feature an image of the candidate (because they say they want to be judged by their policies, rather than their appearance) and cites their Twitter account, which was started in March, as their only social media platform. 

[Image: A block of text from Carlisle’s site about his feelings about CM Kshama Sawant, which conveniently ignores the fact that she has a PhD in economics]

Carlisle isn’t the only libertarian running; we already told you about this fellow who believes that the role of government does not, apparently, include providing transit and seems to have zero answers about how a person could both lower taxes and provide services (on his Facebook page, he cites the Poppe report, which we happen to know even the current Mayor doesn’t totally agree with).

In fact, there’s an entire website that lists the both of them (and next to nothing else; they have two blog posts, both from this month). But whereas Passey is pounding the pavement, Carlisle seems to think they can get by without presenting much of anything other than a platform that resembles a really long Seattle Times comment. 

[Image: Block text from Carlisle’s site, citing Milton Friedman]

Carlisle is so mysterious that on their candidate registration, they’ve listed a PO Box and themselves as a treasurer. There’s no personal information at all (like, none that even demonstrates that this is their real name or that they are a resident of the City of Seattle). 

We did, however, find a voter registration information for a Casey M. Carlisle, which lists him as being 33 years old with a voter registration dating back to August of 2010. Records list two different Capitol Hill addresses, and it appears that he canceled his original voter registration to re-register at some point, though he’s listed as “Inactive.”

And he’s never voted. 

Womp womp. 

As we’ve noted in the past, it’s pretty expensive to even file to run for office, so it’s always curious when someone dives in with both feet on a lark. And while Carlisle seems to fancy themselves quite the politico—they describes themselves as having “spent some time in the federal government and...some time in Seattle”—they also seems to be a little green when it comes to Seattle politics (they says Mayor Ed Murray “seems like a really nice guy” which made me snort-laugh). 

And like a lot of new candidates, the questions Carlisle raises demonstrate a kind of basic misunderstanding of how things work; for example, they’re curious why Seattle is the County seat and if it wouldn’t be cheaper to just move it to somewhere cheaper, like North Bend. Answer: Because North Bend doesn’t have the infrastructure and also the vast majority of County employees take transit to work, which means forcing them to go somewhere without transit would create untenable new traffic patterns on roads that weren’t designed for the aforementioned traffic. Also, unless you completely re-jiggered the County’s bus service, it would be a massively wasteful, environmentally-toxic decision. Plus, it would leave a lot of empty buildings without much parking, which most new businesses wouldn’t readily move into. 

Plus, people like to have their County officials in a centralized location so they can go yell at them. Something Carlisle, who says they “value their privacy” would probably not be really into if they were elected. 

Filing as a member of “the X Party,” a young fellow who announced that he’d be running for City Council via Reddit back in January has finally made good on his promise. 

Ryan Asbert filed his campaign paperwork last week, officially entering the race for Council Seat 8, against experienced, well-funded candidates like Jon Grant and Teresa Mosqueda.  

Asbert’s platform, per his Reddit announcement, was that he’d use an app to let the people of Seattle make the decision. 

A quick lookup of his voter registration info shows his last address as in Seattle, but he’s an inactive voter, having not cast a ballot (at least at that address) since 2008. He has another address listed in Kent, which would make him inelligible to hold the position he’s running for. However, the address listed for himself as his own treasurer IS in Seattle proper, so we’re going to go ahead and assume that’s where he lives.

Per usual, we find it surprising when people have a spare thousand dollars to run for office on a pretty unintelligible platform (Asbert had initially said he’d hoped to get his app up and running by February but it’s April and there’s still no sign of it and also literally how would that work) but like, via con dios, I guess. Currently, the X Party has next to no information available, but maybe he’ll get around to it eventually?

Much like how district elections were kind of designed to get new people into the mix, our allocated donation money from Honest Elections are also supposed to help shake the dust off some of the electoral process. That said, only the two previously-mentioned candidates—Mosqueda and Grant—have qualified for the Democracy Voucher program so far. And neither of them are exactly ~establishment~ either; Mosqueda comes from labor and Grant has been a champion for tenant’s rights.

King County Elections announced yesterday that a record 1,052,872 voters cast a ballot in this year’s general election—more than any recorded year. 

“This is the first time in history that King County Elections received and processed more than 1 million ballots,” KC Elex reported. “In 2012, 993,908 ballots were returned and 978,377 processed."

KC Elex attributes the high number—which notably did not set a turnout record—to the number of new residents moving to the region. 

However, some of their data raised an interesting question—with people relocating to Seattle and the Puget Sound in huge numbers, shouldn’t we be seeing an even bigger boost in voters than this?

According to the elections office, King County adds about 100,000 new voters each year. The population, though, throughout the county has been growing much more quickly. 

“While Seattle and Bellevue saw healthy population growth, Kent and Renton exploded in terms of population, with increases of 224% and 136%, respectively,” reports the Office of Economic and Financial Analysis. 

In total, the county grew by more than 36% in the last 20 years; theoretically, that would mean a similar leap in voters. But looking at County elections data, between 2000 and 2015, the number of active registered voters increased by oless than 20%. 

Some of this may be explained by the fact that people also leave—KC Elex notes that while they “add about 100,000 new registered voters each year. And over the last year, we canceled the registration of about 58,000 voters, mostly people who have moved away from the county.”

Another pretty substantial is the fact that many of the folks moving to our region are new Americans, undocumented, or otherwise unable to vote due to citizenship. 

Again, from the Office of Economic and Financial Analysis:

Between 2000 and 2014, King County's total population increased by around 343,000 residents. The foreign-born population increased by about 173,000 residents, accounting for 50% of the total population growth

Of course, a lot of those folks are citizens—but becoming a citizen is still really damn hard and expensive. Which means it’s not so much that our new neighbors aren’t engaged—it may be that they just can’t because citizenship requirements are restrictive and crappy and it’s hard to get settled (which is why efforts like these are so important). 

So what does this all mean? A few things:

a.) We’re doing an ok job of getting new voters into the system but could probably be doing better.

b.) REAL ID laws and anything else that makes it harder to vote should be resisted at every turn. 

c.) Turnout is still a problem. 

General elections typically see the highest turnout and this year, we did...ok in King County, turning out about 82% of registered voters. But midterms and other crucial races routinely see turnout that’s a lot lower. 

So it’s less about people not registering—a decent number of new people are registering every year—and more about them not getting their damn ballots turned back in. Which is fair because lol we have a lot of fuckin ballots some years. 

But still! Turn in your special election and primary ballots next year! Don’t make us tell you again!*

Yesterday we noted that while Washington and Seattle specifically may feel like a port in the storm during the troubling times ahead, the truth is that we are not immune to the forces of bigotry, racism, misogyny, and xenophobia. 

Which of course, plenty of our community members already know; racism is a daily occurrence and a latent current which flows beneath the feet of well-meaning white people. So, too, is misogyny for women in positions of power, as we saw last spring following the arena vote. 

Yes, even in Seattle. Yes, even here. It happens here, too—as evidenced by the following emails that were sent to Kshama Sawant, which were shared with Seattlish last night. 

What I want to say is: Seattle, we’re better than this. But what I feel is: Seattle, are we better than this?

Our local elected officials have taken bold steps to protect and comfort all of our neighbors this week—Mayor Ed Murray is risking the loss of federal funding by asserting that Seattle will become a Sanctuary City—regardless of their intersections. 

Yesterday at City Hall, powerful local voices—mostly women of color and not a straight white dude in the bunch—declared affirmatively that Seattle will remain a strong place, a safe place, and a place for everyone.

It was somber and it was comforting and it was a reminder that we can build things when we start small and work hard. And we did do that in Washington State on Tuesday with our myriad ballot initiatives. 

In her remarks, CM Lorena González called them out specifically: 

Last night, we demonstrated that the City of Seattle and Washington State as a whole are making change. Seattleites voted to support hotel workers in ensuring a workplace free from violence. Puget Sound residents decided to double down on a mobile and vibrant region. Washingtonians decided that a minimum wage increase and sensible gun reform were overdue. We, as a community, are not afraid. We’re ready to get to work.

In this week of hot takes, there’s plenty of handwringing and fatigue around introspection—but I think this is important to examine closely. How did Seattle and Washington get it so right when the rest of the nation did not—and what do we need to do to ensure that regardless of the national politics, we are taking care of our own to the best of our ability?

The common thread between the initiatives that passed (and the people we elected, including Cyrus Habib, Pramila Jayapal) on Tuesday is that they are rooted in inclusion and a shared goal of broadly improving our state.

These are the kinds of people and candidates we have to fight for. This is what we have to do. This is how we make it through the next four years.

We like to think of Washington as a progressive leader; we’ve been on the right side of history with marriage equality, wages, and protections for workers. Our Governor was the first to state firmly that refugees would always be welcome in Washington in response to the anti-Muslim wave following the Paris nightclub massacre. AG Bob Ferguson is currently going after Comcast for their poor practices.

But we’ve also had some real shitbirds come out of our state, too; then-AG Rob McKenna challenged the ACA (and lost spectacularly) and we’ve dragged our heels on climate change and women’s health. We continue to host an ICE detention center that is a vacuum for tax dollars. I-1515 didn’t make it to the ballot in part because good people fought, but also in part because shitty people run shitty campaigns. The Seattle Police remain an ongoing problem.

Which is to say: We’re not immune to darkness here. There is racism and bigotry and misogyny and homophobia and transmisogyny and xenophobia in Washington and in Seattle as much as there is anywhere in this country. But we do so, so much better when we reject it.

We do so, so much better when we listen to women. And people of color. And queer folks. And new Americans. And poor folks. And everyone who inhabits an intersection between those identities and so many more.

We will do better when we continue to try to be better. That’s the lesson from Tuesday for Washington residents and those of us in Seattle, specifically: We have resources at our disposal to take care of our own even when things seem very bleak. We can demand policies that benefit us all (we didn’t quite flip the Senate in WA but we’re damn close!) and leaders who listen.

There is a city to run. We’re still holding out for move-in fee caps, for affordability solutions, for increased funding to help homeless folks move inside. We’re still waiting to hear how the Mayor is closing the gender wage gap. We’re still wondering if SPD can ever begin to regain trust. We’re still writing out Councilmembers when we need them to listen to us.

We’re still here. We still have work to do. And focusing on the areas where we can get things done—city, county, state—is going to be more important than ever.

So these are our instructions to you: Listen to the people in your life who have something to tell you about their experience, and then ask how you can help.

Write to your lawmakers when you see something that’s the matter.

Read everything you can.

Show up for the things you care about.

To quote Congresswoman-elect Jayapal yesterday, “courage is not fighting when things are easy.”