An example ballot from Seattle Approves
As District 3 voters await the end of the apparently unsuccessful recall of their representative on the City Council, a group of politicos have plans to change the way we choose our candidates in the city with hopes to bring their Seattle Approves initiative to the ballot in 2022.
Organizer and former Kshama Sawant political opponent Logan Bowers calls the proposal “a voting reform that works well for time-broke voters” and “a key equity piece.”
Approval voting would change Seattle’s primary elections to select the top two candidates for the mayor’s office and the council to allow you to support as many candidates as you want, a system Seattle Approves supporters say results in a stronger, more widely supported set of candidates.
“Obviously, voters are having this challenge where they feel like they can’t vote for the candidate they actually like because they’re throwing away their ballot,” Bowers said.
“The mayor’s race is like a perfect example. It was not close. Lorena González got crushed. She was not the right person to leave the primary.”
Powered by a $20,000 grant from the Center for Election Science voting reform organization, Bowers and Seattle Approves began laying the groundwork for the effort in 2020 — a year ago, Bowers penned this op-ed on CHS and described the proposal like this:
Seattle primaries regularly have over a dozen candidates. Under the current system, if you and other voters like two candidates, they’ll split those votes and both will lose—even though they had popular support. We saw this in action where city council candidates were winning 2019 primaries with less than 25% of the vote. When you can pick multiple candidates, your vote is never wasted, your ballot more accurately reflects your preferences, and the candidate with the most voter support prevails.
Bowers said the effort is also informed by his unsuccessful bid to challenge Sawant in 2019 as the transition to district voting and introduction of Democracy Voucher funding swung open the gates and created primaries with more candidates vying for votes than ever.
“Approval voting makes popular candidates win,” Bowers said. “In our current primaries, candidates are winning with only mid-20% of the vote. Only one out of four and they’re still making the general election.”
So far, there aren’t many real world examples in the country. St. Louis and Fargo, North Dakota are the only cities to have implemented it.
In January, Seattle Approves will begin its campaign to get its initiative on the fall ballot with a listening tour and outreach to begin signature gathering. In addition to challenges Bowers sees from “apathy” and “people being angry on Twitter,” the proposal will also face criticism over adding a potential new complication to a voting process that already struggles to reach 50% turnout.
But it could also be fueled by anger and frustration over the city’s current slate of electeds as Seattle continues to struggle with its major crises of affordability, homelessness, addiction and mental health, and the pandemic.
There are also already other voting reform movements underway at the state and local level. Ranked choice, an option that allows voters to select multiple candidates in ranked order, could be another path. FairVote Washington is advocating for the format in the state and at city and county levels and says the change could allow a city like Seattle to skip a primary altogether and use the ranked results to sort out the election in one single vote.
Steps to introduce ranked choice voting in King County are on hold but the election format some advocates say more accurately captures voter preference while eliminating the need for expensive runoff elections could also be a good solution.
For Bowers, the answer is simpler: “Seattle Approves will make better Seattle elections.”
You can learn more at seattleapproves.org.
Oh great, another way the millionaires in the city can get their preferred candidate through the primary.
Nope, allows you to vote for more people who represent you instead of being forced to vote for Inslee so Goodspaceguy doesn’t take over the gov.
Ha ha, this is probably the best answer for those who have been voting in WA state for several years.
Not at all. When St Louis adopted the exact same system in 2019, the white incumbent “Democratic machine” mayor announced just weeks later that she would not seek reelection.
In the following March 2020 primary, the four mayoral candidates were:
The local paper of record strongly endorsed Reed and Spencer, widely seen as the clear “machine” choices.
Voters approved an average of 1.56 candidates, and the results were:
Jones went on to defeat Spencer in the top-two general by a 10% margin, 56.97% to 46.36%. This was the first black female mayor and only the second female mayor in St Louis history.
By allowing voters to support candidates they like without regard to electability (you can hedge by voting for a lesser evil frontrunner, and still support any number of more ideal but long-shot candidates if you like), approval voting gives underdogs a more level playing field against moneyed special interests. It doesn’t put it’s thumb on the scale in any political direction, but it does have effects that are inherently “progressive” in the apartisan sense of the word.
Correction: I accidentally cited the primary results as the general election results. In the general election, Jones beat Spencer by 52% to 48%.
Sure, but that is nothing new. The real opportunity here is to vote for a 3rd party candidate that you may like better as well as the candidate that is the “lesser of two evils” out of one of the big parties that control everything right now. It frees people to choose the person they would want regardless of the party while still allowing them to select the lesser of 2 evil option in case option 1 doesn’t get enough votes. I believe in 2016, at least in a couple states, more conservatives of the time would have chosen a 3rd party option instead of Trump (as I did). But unfortunately, so many of them despised the Clinton option that they held their breath and voted Trump because 3rd party options historically never win. I’ll likely never vote Republican anytime in the near future, but I could be open to moderate 3rd party options. I’m a big fan of Ranked Choice Voting and the option like Seattle is trying because I think it could allow better chances for the underdogs.
I watched the video on their site and I think I get in theory how it works in practice compared with ranked choice voting. This quote I found on the Center for Election Science helps but I’m still a little confused:
“A common misconception is that approval voting gives more weight to voters who vote for more candidates. To see why this isn’t the case, imagine a tied election between a liberal and two conservatives. Bob casts a vote for the liberal, while Alice casts an opposing vote for the two conservatives. After Bob and Alice have voted, the election is still tied. Bob and Alice have an opposite but equal effect on the election. Another way to think of it is that if you vote for all candidates, that has the same effect as not voting at all. The key here is that no voter has an unfair advantage. Effectively, every voter casts a “yes” or “no” vote for every candidate.”
I guess whoever gets the most “yes”s is the winner?
yep! that’s exactly right. instead of voting on just one candidate on your ballot, you get to vote for zero, one, two, three… however many you “approve” of, and the person with the most votes win (just like today!)
Vote for as many as you want—most votes wins. In this case, a top two general is legally required in WA, so the top two advance to the general.
Approval voting allows for a general consensus instead of a polarized race. It’s dead simple, the candidate with the most approval votes received the most general support.
You’d see lower mud slinging and those endless mailers because voting is no longer zero sum, candidates have too represent the interests of their population.
The WA gov election is another good example, 16+ candidates, choose one.
Hey all, I’m available to answer questions and discuss the implications, so bring on the comments and I’ll check back throughout the day.
I do want to highlight the massive success of this voting reform in St Louis. Using approval voting, St Louis elected its first Black woman mayor, Tishaura Jones, a strong progressive, in the history of the city. Jones also ran in 2017, and narrowly lost in a racially charged primary. Then, St Louis’ mayor was elected by 30% of voters.
With approval voting, Jones got 57% approval in the primary and went on win the general. It was a clear upset to the machine politics that dominated before.
Logan, I am not sure the answer to Seattle’s problems is still more progressive wins. We have a very progressive Council by any measure. It seems to me the system has worked just fine at getting progressives in office here. What exactly needs to change in that regard?
Hi Glenn,
Great question. Seattle Approves (and Approval Voting) is non-partisan and candidate independent.
In the St. Louis example, what’s clear is that voters there _wanted_ a progressive outcome but flaws in the voting system prevented that from happening.
What Approval Voting does is select candidates that match the intent of the voters, and there’s going to be wide ranges of how to accomplish that within the very broad umbrellas of “moderate” and “progressive.”
To apply this to Seattle, one example would be recent polling that shows 70+% support from voters for more and better transit. I’d expect that candidates across our entire political spectrum to be much more attuned to providing that transit since it will be an easy, straightforward way to raise their approval.
So you’re saying that we should only enact this because of Progressive and racial issues? Sounds like this only meant for a ideology of one side of the political spectrum…
Not at all. Approval Voting is non-partisan and candidate neutral. What happened in St. Louis was the voters clearly _wanted_ a progressive outcome but the voting system prevented it.
Approval Voting is better at selecting candidates that match the desires of the voters. I think we can all think of issues in Seattle that are popular with voters but that elected officials don’t prioritize because their base doesn’t care.
Those are the kinds of issues that candidates will become much more receptive to working on. Just exciting their base will no longer be enough, they’ll need to earn much more Approval by delivering more for other constituencies.
Okay. Logan, you cite St. Louis electing a progressive woman of color as an example of success of this system of voting. However, two years ago you, a white guy, ran against a progressive woman of color for the D3 city council seat. Given that your desired outcome of the 2019 election was very different – and one could say diametrically opposed – from the single example you choose to promote this new election scheme, why are you promoting the St. Louis mayoral election to sell us this plan?
Hi Oliver, Approval Voting is a voting system that selects winning candidates that better match the will of the voters. What was clear in St. Louis between the 2017 and 2021 races was that a majority of voters wanted a more progressive candidate but the voting system prevented that outcome.
I’m a fan – I can see how this can make elections a better representation of what people actually think. Hope it can become reality!
Approval voting might be a better system than we have now (admittedly not a very high bar to clear) but I don’t see the advantage over ranked-choice voting, which allows one to endorse multiple acceptable candidates while signaling a preference for one over another. Approval voting doesn’t seem to allow for this, so under that system I would probably in most cases end up voting for only one person, rather than all the ones I “approve” of. Maybe there are advantages to approval voting that I’m overlooking but I do know this: Either system would still require a measure of strategic triangulation. Since not everyone can win, there’s really no way to avoid that.
Hi CKathes,
Note that the change we’re proposing only affects the primary, so the top two still go on to a general election (where you can express a preference for your absolute top choice). There’s lots of academic research on the topic, and it turns out that in aggregate, Approval Voting is better at selecting candidates that accurately represent what voters intended.
The reason for that is because on a ranked ballot, the votes below your first—or maybe second—choice are completely discarded and never taken into account (because the candidate wasn’t eliminated). If there’s a few minor candidates, ranked systems basically end up being the same as our existing (plurality) voting system. If there are two or more candidates with nearly the same level of base support, ranked systems start to get really weird. They become very sensitive to elimination order, and can (and do) eliminate a broadly popular candidate in favor of a much less popular one that is guaranteed to lose in the general election.
Approval takes all of your choices into account at once, which aggregated across all voters gives a more accurate result.
Primaries in Seattle typically have over 10 candidates. If you really only have one candidate you wish to ride-or-die on, that’s fine, and approval supports that. Most folks we talk to, for example, usually express they’d be happy with anywhere between 2 and 4 of the candidates in the last mayoral race. Since the top two advance to the general election, folks always have the ability to pick their absolute favorite in the end.
Approval voting is better than ranked choice voting in every way we can measure. A major part of this is that the rank choice voting tabulation algorithm ignores most of the rankings you mark on your ballot.
https://www.electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-versus-irv/
Sawant keeps winning elections, so the solution is to invent a new voting system that’s specifically designed to make it sure she doesn’t make it through the primary process?
This is a system that’s designed so a minority can veto a candidate supported by the majority. If you are just selecting all the candidates you “approve” of, and there is no ranking mechanism, then the most moderate candidate will always win. That’s clearly the plan here. Especially since it’s coming from someone who lost to Sawant.
This is clearly a scheme to reengineer Seattle’s political system by the moderates who have been losing city council elections…
There are some folks here suggesting this is a conspiracy to help elect progressives, because it resulted in two progressive women going to be mayoral general in St Louis, and then they got their first black female mayor, generally thought of as a “fiery” progressive.
Now we see folks suggesting it’s instead a conspiracy to stop progressives.
But approval voting wasn’t adopted by a 64% majority in Fargo, and a 68% majority in St Louis, with the intent of ultimately stopping Sawant. The goal is to elect the most preferred candidate, and decades of research say that it does just that.
I would recommend you read the book the Vote by William Poundstone if you want to know the nitty-gritty details. I assure you it’s not part of some partisan conspiracy. The point really is to elect the candidate that makes the most people most satisfied. To maximize human welfare.
Here is a link to a fairly good discussion. RCV seems to be preferred.
Approval voting is simpler than RCV and gets as good or better results based on decades of research.
https://www.electionscience.org/library/approval-voting-versus-irv/
Is it just me, or is the link not present in your message?
https://www.fairvote.org/electoral_systems_rcv_vs_approval_voting