Race baiting is not "better information".
Krist Novoselić (Februrary 5, 2024)
The Seattle Left has found a nifty way to finally win elections. SB5723 and HB1932 are two Democratic party bills in Olympia this session which offer local jurisdictions the option to consolidate their voting with even year federal and state elections. Proponents of the legislation rely on scholarship to make their case. Advocates are hot-to-trot, as research suggests consolidating elections gives partisan advocates an advantage at the polls.
NONVOTERS THAT VOTE
Researchers Hajnal, Kogan and Markarian say,
“Recent studies demonstrate that voters and nonvoters in America have increasingly divergent policy preferences, with nonvoters favoring a more liberal, activist agenda. . . higher turnout is increasingly associated with more liberal policy out-comes and higher support for Democratic candidates.”
This research says all we need to know about the push for consolidated elections.
VOTING RIGHTS CHARADE
Can’t argue with the fact even year elections produce more voters than odd years. Olympia Democrats and their supporters have found the nice perch of advocating for more voter participation. Don’t buy this. It’s a rosy picture painted over raw knuckled partisanship. This is the same party weaponizing the Voting Rights Act (VRA), by gerrymandering the state while destroying our redistricting commission process.
This is also the majority party refusing, year after year, to pass a local option bill for proportional representation — allowing local communities to empower voters while protecting themselves from litigation.
Hannah Krieg recently authored a hit piece in The Stranger targeting Seattle City Council President Sara Nelson’s comment on consolidation. Nelson said, “Greater turnout doesn’t necessarily mean a better-informed public when it comes to the issues that impact people’s daily lives most directly, which is the stuff that comes out of City Hall”.
Krieg points to the various information available to voters, and I agree local election reporting is important. However, the writer then goes off the rails with her identity-politics / virtue signaling characterization of Nelson, “supporting a status quo of voter suppression with the same infantilizing arguments used to disenfranchise Black would-be voters during the Jim Crow era.”
Jim Crow leaders were not infantilizing. White supremacy is dangerous. It’s ridiculous, and actually disgusting, to paint Sara Nelson in this light. Segregationists, when not engaged in violence, used things like literacy tests, sparse polling locations, winner-take-all at-large elections and other dirty tricks to disenfranchise Blacks.
The VRA, passed in 1965, started to protect people affected by the treachery.
This brings us to today’s reality. Eligible voters from all walks of life are entitled to vote in city elections held in odd numbered years. They can vote over a period of weeks, as their schedule allows. Ballots arrive in the mail and include postage paid return envelopes! And yes, they have access to information from various media outlets. There is even an official voters guide, printed at public expense.
It is a cushy system, yet in 2023, most Seattle eligible voters had other priorities.
BETTER INFORMATION?
Krieg’s smear piece underscores Sarah Nelson’s statement about a better-informed public.
Krieg libels Nelson as Lester Maddox resurrected. Seattle’s Left try to obscure their own failed policies by constantly trashing opponents as some kind of villains. They’re hoping to rely on smokescreens to motivate the voters who make it to the bottom of the even-year ballot. These voters are only turning out for high profile federal and state elections. Trying to motivate them with race baiting is desperate. Politics through pejoratives does not lead to a better-informed public — especially in an even year election where there is enough noise already.
CASCADE PARTY of WASHINGTON