Washington Progressive Blog

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News Articles and other Major Media

Friday, April 22, 2005

Robert Jamieson of the Seattle PI did a wonderful interview with Christal Wood, our candidate for Seattle Mayor. Please pass the word!

Saturday, March 5th, 2005

On Saturday, Christal, Susan and Linde joined Paul Richmond, probable King county Sheriff candidate, and host Vivian McPeak on THC (Hemp) TV on Seattle's cable access.

We discussed the immediate return of voting rights for ex-felons who have served their time, even if they haven't paid all of their fines. We also talked about Christal's campaign and the party--including our platform. I wish we had more notice, but we are working on getting a tape for everyone to see.

April 29th, Real Change, Seattle

An instant alternative

Here's a thumbnail history of six months worth of reforms to Washington's primary elections system: First, we had the Blanket Primary. Then the major parties got it outlawed, and the state legislature replaced it with the "top-two" system, where the most popular two candidates in any primary race advance to November"s general election.

Then Governor Gary Locke vetoed the top-two and selected the legislature's runner-up choice, the so-called Montana Primary. Now, there is the Washington Grange's citizen initiative to bring back the Top-Two system.

So get ready for one of the lesser-known initiatives in the 2004 political season: Initiative 318, an all-volunteer signature drive to replace Washington's primary and general elections with instant-runoff voting.

"Our motto is: the best primary is no primary," says Seattle lawyer Jerry Cronk, who is filed the initiative and is now working with a coalition of minor parties to get it on the November ballot.

He sees instant-runoff voting (IRV, for short) as a way to avoid the so-called "spoiler" effect created by third-party candidates like Ralph Nader and Ross Perot.

IRV is a means of ranking each candidate in a race according to the voter's preference. The way IRV works is rather difficult to explain, but here's a good-faith effort: Under our current system, voters are allowed only one vote per race and the winner of an election is the candidate with the most votes. In three-way races (e.g. between multiple Presidential candidates), whoever got the most votes wins. In IRV, voters rank candidates. If no single candidate is the first choice of a majority of voters, the least popular candidate is eliminated. The ballots that belonged to that candidate now go to whoever was the second-choice preference.

Here's a real-world example of how IRV might work: in the 2004 election, a voter who shared the ideals of Ralph Nader, skeptically approved of Al Gore, and abhorred George W. could have ranked the three candidates in order of preference. Since no single candidate held a majority of the first-choice votes, the least popular (Nader) would have been eliminated and his supporters' second choices (likely Gore) would have been tallied up.

"Voters won’t be faced with these dilemmas of 'wasting' their votes voting for the favorite candidate who might be a long-shot," says Cronk. "They can select their long shot as a first choice, and if they don’t have a majority, the counting process views their second choice."

Cronk says he first heard of IRV at a meeting three years ago. He then cobbled together his own proposal for such a system based on a failed Alaska citizens' initiative and a report from the San Francisco-based Center for Voting and Democracy. He sent it to State Senator Adam Kline, a southeast Seattle Democrat, "and lo and behold," he says, Kline introduced it in the legislature. Rep. Hans Dunshee has also expressed his support for IRV. Despite repeat attempts, though, Kline's bill has never made it out of committee.

Cronk attributes its unpopularity to the sense of "conservatism and over-caution" among the powerful.

"My supposition is that people who have held political office for a while are suspicious of anything new," he says. "They're not going look favorably on something that would change the system that got them elected."

Linde Knighton, co-chair of the Progressive Party of Washington, says that that type of conservatism is reflected in the fate of the blanket primary. In the new Montana primary, individuals select a certain party's ballot. She claims that offering individual ballots for individual parties will effectively shut out small parties who don’t have the money or power to put forth a range of candidates for each office. A slim ballot won't appeal to independent voters, she says. This, combined with new state elections laws that require a higher number of valid signatures for a candidate to get on the ballot, means that the state is "asking the people to pay for a primary for the Democrats, the Republicans, and the Libertarians, and have everyone else pay for their own."

In their spare time, Knighton, Cronk, and others are gathering signatures for Initiative 318 in King and Pierce Counties.

- Adam Holdorf

Monday, July 26, 2004

PI article mentions Progressive Party Forgets Progressive Party history with second and third choices in direct primary.

Progressive Party calls for end to $64 Billion in Tax Breaks