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Welcome to Sightline Institute’s redesigned website!

You’ll find our same top-notch solutions research, just with a fresh new look. Learn more here about new features, or simply browse as usual. 

Collection: What Democracy Looks Like

Oregon Legislature Passes New Motor Voter Law

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Editor’s note October 2016: Did you know the Portland area has experienced a double-digit boom in the percentages of people registered to vote in the upcoming presidential election? This increase is thanks to the implementation of the Oregon Motor Voter Law, a program that automatically registers eligible voters. We’re bringing back this popular post to highlight how this … Read more

Event: Innovative Solutions to Money in Politics

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Next Thursday, join our executive director Alan Durning to discuss how unfettered money has changed the political landscape and what Oregonians can do to make sure their voices are heard. Deb Field, executive board member of Main Street Alliance, will be joining Alan. There will be a live jazz performance by the Mel Brown B3 Organ Group after the event (note … Read more

Event: Buying the Ballot Box

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Your ballot is in. Most of the races have been called. The TV screen is political ad-free again. But it’s a different world out there for voters since the 2010 Citizens United decision and other massive campaign finance rule changes. This Saturday, join in conversation with Sightline Executive Director Alan Durning and KIRO Radio’s Dave Ross … Read more

Jury-Rigging Democracy

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“The best argument against democracy,” Winston Churchill reportedly said, “is a five-minute conversation with the average voter.” Watching native-born Americans belly flop on a citizenship test suggests Churchill wasn’t far wrong.

But what about a week-long conversation? Worse? Actually, no.

An intriguing model of citizen participation in Oregon suggests that prolonged conversations with voters—or, conversations among voters—can dramatically improve democracy. The model is based on the jury: the panel of disinterested voters, operating under strict rules of procedure, presented with arguments and evidence, and left to apply their judgment to a case.

What an independent, nonpartisan Oregon group called Healthy Democracy has begun doing, with the sanction of state government, is to submit pending ballot measures to quasi-jury trials and then publish the results in the voters’ pamphlet. What’s so intriguing is that Oregon voters are starting to pay special heed to the one-page verdicts of these mock trials. In fact, before long, such juries could hold more sway than millions of dollars in campaign cash.

Oregon’s Citizens’ Initiative Reviews (CIRs) are perhaps the brightest light in the constellation of reforms to the initiative process that I’ve been mapping in this set of articles. And paradoxically, they do nothing to stem the tide of Big Money (after all, SCOTUS won’t let us). Instead, they just aim to make money matter less.

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Have You Signed?

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You know the drill. To get into the Safeway, you’re going to have to walk past the man with the clipboards. “Are you a registered voter?” he is asking you already, when you’re still 10 feet away. “Have you signed for…?” Whatever the pitch, it’s hard to decline, because he looked you in the eye and asked politely. It’s a small request. He’ll be here on the way out, too.

Who are these people? They’re paid signature gatherers. They travel from state to state, chasing the big initiatives, working as independent contractors for shady companies that reward them for each signature—a dollar or two or even more per valid signer. This petition derby yields intense incentives for gatherers to mislead voters, making the initiative sound sweeter than it is, and to engage in fraud, copying names from phone books, for example. But it’s also how the system works nowadays.

Citizens’ initiatives have become another business. Petitioning is no longer a test of popular ferment; it’s a test of sponsors’ money. As Western Washington University politics professor Todd Donovan says, “No one can get on the ballot unless they’ve got a million bucks.”

There are ways to mend this signature-gathering process, and they mostly focus on eliminating abuses. That’s the good news.

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Full Disclosure

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Can’t the Northwest states just ban Big Money in citizens’ initiatives?

Unfortunately, the answer is no.

The US Supreme Court has forbidden limits on money for ballot measures, a lamentable state of affairs that may take a decade or more to reverse through favorable judicial appointments and new jurisprudence. That’s a long-term undertaking, but it’s an achievable one. The New York-based Brennan Center for Justice and others are already engaged in building the new legal philosophies and establishing precedents. (Unfortunately, current legal trends are moving in the opposite direction.) In the meantime, the Northwest can protect and strengthen its best-in-class rules for full disclosure of initiative funders. It can also join Iowa in making corporate boards or shareholders vote to authorize initiative spending.

SCOTUS on Initiatives

The timeline of federal court rulings is disheartening.

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Initiative Inflation

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We northwesterners tend to be proud of our direct democracy. We are the birthplace of the citizens’ initiative and pioneer of trend-setting ballot measures on everything from direct election of Senators to women’s suffrage, from death with dignity to marriage equality.

But behind this civic mythology lies a reality that is decidedly more mixed and worrisome. Initiatives do create a channel to circumvent sometimes-hapless or lobbyist-bound state houses, and they do allow breakthroughs on issues sometimes.

On the other hand, they also create tremendous opportunities for political mischief by playing on the public’s misperceptions. Just consider the many ill-conceived initiatives peddled by Tim Eyman in Washington or Bill Sizemore in Oregon. More generally, initiatives cost a fortune, are dominated by corporations and the 1 percent, and are now often played out as proxy battles in national policy wars that have little to do with the Northwest. They also leave the door open to unintended consequences.

Don’t get me wrong! For all their flaws, initiatives have sometimes yielded welcome changes. My father had greater peace of mind in his final months thanks to the death-with-dignity option approved by Washington voters in 2008; and I get to look forward to the possibility of attending weddings for all three of my children someday, thanks to marriage equality. (For the record, though, marriage equality was passed by the Washington legislature and affirmed by voters on a referendum forced by equality’s opponents. British Columbia and Oregon got marriage equality through the courts. So citizens’ initiatives were not key to marriage equality in Cascadia.)

[prettyquote align=”right”]”There’s no contradiction in cheering loudly for your team and still criticizing the rules of the game.” [/prettyquote]

Repeat: I am not disparaging initiatives; far from it. My argument is with the process, not all the outcomes. There’s no contradiction in cheering loudly for your team and still criticizing the rules of the game.

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Measures of Money

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Six hundred dollars.

That’s how much money residents of Washington State donated to the “No” campaign in the 2013 initiative concerning genetic engineering. The vote was not about banning the use of gene splicing techniques, nor about regulating them. It was not about warning consumers away from genetically modified products. It wasn’t even about studying the practice. All it proposed to do was require food products to indicate on their packaging whether they contained genetically altered ingredients. Not, you would think, the stuff of all-out war. In fact, it’s a rather milquetoast policy change.

Yet Big Ag treated the measure like Pearl Harbor; it sought to make an example of Washington’s I-522. The NO committee buried the proposition in $22 million of campaign cash. The biggest checks came from the Grocery Manufacturers (which collected it from Coke, Pepsi, and other junk food brands), Monsanto, and the agricultural arms of Dow, DuPont, and Bayer.

That’s more money than any initiative campaign, pro or con, had ever spent in the Northwest. It’s more than Jay Inslee or Rob McKenna spent running for governor. In fact, it’s not far off from what those two men spent together. It’s substantially more than the collective campaign budgets of every single candidate for the state house in 2012. And every one of those $22 million went to decide whether Coke bottles, for example, might have to say somewhere on them, “Partially produced with genetic engineering.”

This story neatly encapsulates the state of initiative politics in the Northwest nowadays. In the words of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer’s Joel Connelly, dean of Cascadian political reporters, “Citizens have a right to put something on the ballot, and special interests have the right to spend a fortune beating up on it, which usually works.”

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Northwest Knows Best?

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Research by Jane Harvey

Last time, I described Buckley v Valeo, the seminal Supreme Court ruling that teed up Citizens United and that forbids caps on political spending in the United States. In that case, Chief Justice Warren Burger dissented, writing, “What remains after today’s holding leaves no more than a shadow of what Congress contemplated. I question whether the residue leaves a workable program.”

This article documents the residue—the unworkable program that attempts to regulate money in politics—in Idaho, Oregon, and Washington. What rules of disclosure, contribution limits, and public funding govern democracy in the Northwest states?

Disclosure

“Sunlight is . . . the best of disinfectants,” said early 20th Century Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, and disclosure rules of varying stringency cover all of the Northwest. Yet loopholes puncture them, and obfuscation remains widespread. As bad, even when they work, disclosure rules mostly make public long lists of donor names and dollar amounts, leaving voters with little usable information about whom politicians listen to and why. In fact, regular media reports on fundraising totals amp up the fundraising pressure on candidates.

Federal candidates must report the contributions they receive, their expenditures, and other financial information to the Federal Election Commission seven times on specified dates during election years. Donors who give more than $200 must reveal their name, occupation, employer, and address to the campaign, which must report that information. Some independent expenditure campaigns must also disclose contributors and spending.

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