Democracy Vouchers Are a Bargain

With a miniscule portion of the city’s budget, democracy vouchers deliver a whopping impact. 

The program’s funding is up for renewal this August, and it’s a great deal. The renewal budget, $4.5 million per year in property taxes, is just 0.053 percent of the city’s $8.5 billion 2025 budget. Renewal is an even smaller proportion of the budget than the original 2015 levy (which you also needed a magnifying glass to see). 

That’s a pretty amazing price for the program’s benefits. I’ve already covered how democracy vouchers 

• empower tens of thousands more residents to support local candidates they believe in; 

• cultivate a more representative donor pool; 

• reduce the flow of out-of-state and big-dollar donations; and 

• encourage more diverse candidates to run, connect with voters, and win office. 

It’s delivering real bang for the buck. The democracy voucher renewal cost can still be referred to as “budget dust,” as was the original 2015 levy. What’s more, that miniscule proportion of the total budget will continue to shrink as the city’s budget grows (which it’s done every year) and the levy rate stays constant. Over the course of its first nine years, the $3 million democracy voucher levy compressed from an already-tiny 0.059 percent of the 2016 city budget to 0.038 percent in 2024. 

The Democracy Voucher Program is at least as worthwhile as many other similarly priced items in the city’s 2025 budget. Among them, 

• three months of public golf course maintenance and programs; 

• half of the annual funds for technology investments in construction and inspections; 

• fewer than three weeks of park maintenance; 

• eight weeks of debt service payments; and 

• four months of benefits management for retired employees. 

What does the levy mean for individual property owners? The tax rate in the proposition is $2.27 per $1,000 of assessed value in the first year, representing an additional tax rate of $0.015 per $1,000 from the existing funding rate. That comes to about $13.07 per year for a median-priced house, according to the SEEC—about a $4 per year increase, or even less when accounting for inflation. 

In other words, for an annual household cost less than the price of a single movie ticket, Seattleites can continue to reshape a fundamental part of their democracy. 

Thoughtful budgeting for an effective program 

In 2015 the Honest Elections campaign set the program funding levy at $3 million per year. That turned out to be a pretty good estimate of what it would take to launch and run democracy vouchers for Seattle, and it’s kept the program solvent for its first ten years. Spending fluctuates year to year, of course (Seattle’s elections are in odd-numbered years, so that’s when the bulk of the costs come through), and unused funds from one year roll over to support costs in the next. 

Administrators at the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission (SEEC), the entity that runs the program, estimated what it will take to fund another decade of democracy vouchers and determined that the program needs a slight increase from the past rate to keep going.¹ With years of data behind them, they could better guess how to account for differing numbers of candidates and residents using the program. 

It’s true that a lot of Seattleites still don’t use their vouchers, letting them languish on a forgotten shelf. But neither the original program designers (including Sightline) nor the SEEC expect 100 percent of Seattle residents to hand in vouchers; total participation is neither the program’s success metric nor the budgeting baseline. They know that campaign finance reform is a tough nut to crack, and there will always be people who don’t engage politically in that way.  

Still, the current level of voucher dollars flowing in is impressive—enough to fund the bulk of participating candidates’ campaigns and place Seattle as having one of the top, if not the highest, contributor rates of all US cities. What’s more, most city candidates have opted into the program, just as the architects of the program hoped, which is a boon for transparency and for limiting big donor dominance. 

In short, the data shows that it’s a tiny budget item with outsized impact: democracy vouchers power more participation by “we the people” across Seattle—and all for a song.