Bolts Magazine:

Seattle is poised to continue its experiment in public campaign financing. Voters on Tuesday appear to have renewed the city’s democracy vouchers program, which provides each adult Seattle resident with four $25 vouchers they can donate to local candidates of their choice. 

The ballot measure, which leads by 17 percentage points in the count as of Friday evening, will generate $4.5 million in property taxes a year to fund the program for the next decade. Had it failed, the tax levy that voters approved in 2015 would have expired, winding down the democracy vouchers.

Supporters celebrated the measure’s success, which comes eight years after Seattle first implemented the program. Since then, studies have found that the vouchers have strengthened the influence of everyday residents on local politics and allowed a wider array of candidates to launch campaigns, decreasing their reliance on big-money donors.

“Seattle showed the country what’s possible when we commit to making local elections more inclusive and accountable,” said Cinthia Illan-Vazquez, executive director of the Washington Bus, an organization that promotes civic engagement among youth. “At a time when federal courts and extremist politicians are attacking voting rights and blocking campaign finance reforms, Seattle voters just sent a powerful message: We will protect our democracy and keep building toward a system that truly represents all of us.” . . .

Proponents of the program also highlight how it has increased the number and diversity of people donating to local elections, drawing in Seattleites who otherwise may be disengaged from city politics. According to a University of Washington study, over the first two cycles of the program, Seattle saw a 350 percent increase in the number of unique donors. 

Another, more recent study, conducted by researchers at Stony Brook University and Georgetown University, found that the donors using democracy vouchers were more likely to be young and lower-income. 

These changes are making local elections more competitive and creating a tougher road for incumbents to win reelection, according to the University of Washington study. Alex Gallo Brown, campaign manager of Katie Wilson, the progressive mayoral candidate who is currently leading Mayor Bruce Harell in Tuesday’s primary, thinks that democracy vouchers were critical to Wilson’s success. 

Ansley Skipper and Drew Penrose write about the obvious solution to gerrymandering: proportional representation.

Most modern democracies don’t have legislative districts represented by only one legislator — which is why most don’t struggle with gerrymandering like we do. Instead, a majority of democracies today use proportional multimember districts (we’ll get back to what this means in a bit), which makes gerrymandering “prohibitively difficult” in practice, in the words of that same study. Our decision to use single-member districts makes gerrymandering possible in the first place. . . .

But here’s one of the biggest problems: Even if we got rid of gerrymandering, biased outcomes — the thing we really care about when we talk about gerrymandering — will persist as long as we have single-member districts. . . .

But there is a solution. A system that would end boundary-drawing brawls and make our democracy more effective, inclusive, and representative. It’s called proportional representation. How it works is intuitive: Share of votes equals share of seats. . . .

Under proportional representation, we can have it all. The same map can be competitive and fair, representative and compact. Racial minorities can be represented even when they don’t live in the same area. District lines can much more easily follow existing political and real-world geography.

Plus, because it creates more competition and a more representative system, proportional representation opens the door for more politically viable parties, more coalition-building, and more cross-ideological allegiances. A more representative government with more incentives for compromise and moderation could also mean a more responsive, effective government. . . .

And proportional systems are much harder, if not impossible, to gerrymander — because voters’ representation is based on how they vote, not where they live. It’s easy to make the opposition a minority in any given district. It’s impossible to draw them out entirely.

Rick H. has recently lamented that more media attention is being paid to the current fight over mid-decade redistricting than over the Supreme Court’s potential ruling in the Louisiana Voting Rights Act case. Both are huge developments in the field of election law, and I’d hate to have to prioritize. Instead, I will just observe quickly that the system of “self-districting” that I proposed a few years ago would solve both problems. First, it would make partisan gerrymandering by government officials obsolete, thereby eliminating the concern over what is happening in Texas right now. Second, it would empower minority voters to form districts of their own choosing, thereby avoiding the necessity of a VRA remedy for minority vote dilution. Moreover, an adverse decision in the Louisiana case would not be an obstacle to the adoption of a self-districting system, as it would not raise any concerns about the government drawing district lines on the basis of race. Instead, the districting decisions would be the free choices of individual citizens on the basis of whatever values they choose.

Here’s the first of a periodic column I will be doing for SCOTUSblog. It comes with this introductory description:

The biggest questions in constitutional law concern the power of the Supreme Court to decide questions differently from what elected officials want. Sometimes the Supreme Court insists upon having the last word in the name of enforcing constitutional commands concerning the requirements of justice or even democracy itself. But the current court is hesitant to interfere to protect democracy, and the events taking place right now in Texas raise the pressing question of whether there is another way for the court to protect democracy without insisting upon having the last word.

ELB readers may be interested that, as stated in this first piece, a general theme of the column will be the Court’s abandonment of the democracy-enhancing theory of judicial review most famously articulated by John Hart Ely and what if anything can be done to preserve or revitalize that role for the Court under current conditions. Specifically, in light of the current race to the bottom with respect to mid-decade redistricting, this piece expands upon the point made in a previous ELB post that consideration should be given to the idea of a “dormant” Elections Clause analogous to the “dormant” Commerce Clause, so that the Supreme Court has the option of a less interventionist democracy-enhancing role than what Ely articulated.