Seattle was the first city in the nation to offer publicly funded vouchers for donations to local candidates. The goal is to counterbalance the influence of large financial interests in local elections.
The launch of the city’s reform garnered national attention.
Researchers indicate that Seattle elections are now attracting a wider and more diverse range of donors and candidates.
“I can tell you that the program has diversified both the donor pool and the candidate pool. So if we look at donors in Seattle, relative to before the program began in Seattle in 2017, there’s been a huge increase in participation in local campaign finance,” said Dr. Jennifer Heerwig, a sociology professor at SUNY-Stony Brook.
“If you look at 2021, which was the third cycle of the program, there was actually a 700% increase in participation in local election financing,” Heerwig explained.
In 2023, Seattle voters allocated nearly 95,000 Democracy Vouchers to fund the City Council elections, injecting almost $2.4 million into 30 different campaigns.
Heerwig has studied the program since the beginning and conducts research in Seattle during every election cycle.
“If we look inside the donor pool, we see a couple of interesting patterns. Donors are now younger on average; they also contain more people of color; and they also contain a higher share of lower-income folks relative to traditional cash donors in your local elections here in Seattle,” she said.
