What Seattle’s recent election reveals about the success of democracy vouchers

Seattleites are warming to the idea of using democracy vouchers, and a cottage industry of reaping those dollars has cropped up around a recent spate of progressive campaigns. Andrew Grant Houston’s campaign, a 2021 mayoral candidate that came into the race with almost no name recognition, was an acid test for the program’s success or failure.

Seattle residents returned 184,747 vouchers in 2021 over 147,128 in 2019, according to a recently published Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission report. 470,222 were mailed in total.

The first-of-its-kind democracy voucher program was approved in 2015, funded through 2025 by a $3-million-a-year property tax.

With campaign spending at record heights, is Seattle’s Democracy Voucher program still working?

Seattle’s 2021 primary saw a number of progressive candidates leverage democracy vouchers to success. Mayoral candidate Andrew Grant Houston effectively funded his entire campaign with vouchers, raising $346,325 of his total $428,768.05 in campaign expenses through the program.

2021 – Democracy Voucher Funds Distributed to Candidates (The Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission)

Just shy of $164,000 of those expenses were billed to Prism West, the brainchild of Riall Johnson, a former professional football player turned political consultant. While Prism provides general political consulting — their services range from digital advertising to creating campaign mailers — much of their work on the Houston campaign involved canvassing for democracy vouchers.

“The democracy voucher program lined up with what we’re already doing … approaching a stranger on the street, and seeing if they believe in certain issues and certain ideals … We just maximize that with the democracy vouchers … engage with [whomever] normally isn’t engaged in the democratic process, especially in the primaries,” Johnson told MyNorthwest.

Prism worked with two other candidates during the 2021 primaries — two of whom reached the general election: Nicole Thomas-Kennedy, progressive city attorney darkhorse, and Nikkita Oliver, an activist who ran for an at-large city council position.

Houston stands out insofar as he was the first candidate in that primary to reach the fundraiser cap off democracy vouchers, but ultimately failed to make waves in the election — garnering more democracy vouchers than actual votes.

Houston defends his decision to spend $164,000 on a political consultant that focused on voucher canvassing over traditional campaign expenses: robust advertising campaigns in mediums like television. Johnson and Houston both point to paying their canvassers living wages as indicative of the progressive values that led them to work on the mayoral campaign to begin with, regardless of whether the election was won or lost.

Houston’s staff were represented by the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades Local 116, and paid a base wage of $18.

“It was important to me to run a campaign where we lived our values. It would have been a hollow victory if we had simply dumped all of our money into advertising, and gotten my name out in other ways at the sacrifice of every individual who was working underneath me. We were focused on creating something that was about a larger group of people, a larger coalition,” Houston told MyNorthwest.

In reference to that larger coalition, Houston claimed that he is not considering another run at office, instead focusing his attention on his architecture business.

Critics of democracy vouchers point to the idea that it has subsidized candidates without name recognition to the tune of $3.5 million in taxpayer dollars, candidates like Houston who failed to pass out of the primary stage.

At least one other Prism client, Nicole Thomas Kennedy, ultimately came within 10,000 votes of winning the election for Seattle City Attorney. Johnson points to that election as indicative of the role that democracy vouchers have to play in giving progressive candidates, without name recognition, real chances at winning elections.

The consultant emphasized the importance of running candidates with deeply held convictions— he pointed to Varisha Khan, a sitting Redmond city councilmember and one of the only Muslim women to hold public office in state history—as examples of Prism’s ideological tenets.

“We got a lot of candidates … that were told not to run in the first place … Andrew Grant Houston fit right in that wheelhouse of people that probably told him not to run,” Johnson continued.

“We looked at him and said, ‘Yes, … your ideals match ours. We’re here for you.’ So we didn’t get the votes, but we made an impact. He made an impact on Seattle.”

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