S5E04: Overturned Tables: Vouchers: Alan Durning

This is Larry Lessig.

I'm an old man, at least relatively speaking. And as an old man I've given many, many, many talks. My CV reports over a thousand lectures given across the course of my career. And the vast majority of them, I believe, have been about our so called democracy. And I still remember what I think will be the most consequential of those thousand plus lectures. It was in Seattle I was talking about my then just published book, Republic Lost. That book describes a distinctive corruption that I think describes America's corrupt democracy. The corruption of the dependence that political candidates have on the private funding of their campaigns, a dependence on those funders. And that dependence, I argued, is corrupting because it inherently conditions representatives to be responsive to the needs of their funders. First Bas Tweet, the head of the Tammany Hall Democratic Party political Machine in the 19th century, New York City and state used to say, I don't care who does the electing as long as I get to do the nominating. It doesn't take a political scientist to see the genius in that insight. If you can control who can run, you control who wins, regardless of who wins more votes.

Tweedism, let's call it, was the strategy

of the Old south, where states like Texas forbid blacks from voting in the Democratic primary at a time when only the Democratic Party had any power in Texas. There too, racists didn't need to worry about who actually won the election because they had already filtered the list of candidates to assure only the racists were running. And that's what big money does in American politics today.

You can't run for office in America

unless you can raise money.

And only if you do raise money

can you be a relevant candidate. Of course, to have any power, you need to win. But money has put you on the list of those who can win. And that means, like Boss Tweed, money controls. Now, the remedy to this kind of corruption is to change how campaigns are funded. And that's what the Seattle speech, just as I had in hundreds of other speeches, argued as well. That's what I argued in the Seattle speech had to happen across America.

And there I described one idea that

I then thought and still think makes the most sense. Vouchers. Give every voter a number of vouchers, which they can then give to the candidates they want to support to help those candidates fund their campaigns. And then the voters, not the Tweeds, are the funders of all the changes that could change the power of money in politics. This idea, which I had stolen from Bruce Ackerman and Ian Ayers, in which Rick Hasen had described as well, seems to me to be the most powerful idea. Alan Durning heard this idea during that Seattle speech. Durning had started Sightline, which is an independent nonprofit research and communications center in Seattle in 1993. Sightline has been devoted to great ideas that could make the Northwest, including Seattle, obviously work better. He was a graduate of Oberlin College. He had long worked in policy reform, including democratic reform, and he believed he could take the idea of vouchers and make it part of Seattle's law. In this episode, he tells that story as well as the story, as he sees it, of how vouchers could matter to democracy more generally. Thus, here again, we have an overturned table tweetest funding of campaigns that we could easily write through. The structure of funding through vouchers.

Enjoy the conversation. So, Alan, thank you so much for talking to us. You and I got to know each other a long time ago and the beginning of a process that you were pretty instrumental in bringing some important changes into Seattle. I wonder how you think about the beginning of that and what you thought you were solving or helping to solve when you were part of that process.

Well, thanks, Larry. It's really an honor to get to talk with you a little bit and with your listeners as well. In 2012 and 13, I, as the director of Sightline Institute, which is a policy research center in Seattle, was paying a lot of attention to how to improve our democracy because all the problems that we work on that my organization works on as our main mission, about environmental sustainability and climate change and clean energy and sprawl and so on, we were just getting stuck. The systems government weren't working at the federal level, the state level, at the local level as well. I was thinking hard about democracy itself and how to make it function better. And I read a lot of work by you and a few other theorists and scholars suggesting that money in politics was a driving source of the problem. The fact that politicians have to spend half or more of their time dialing for dollars, probably to quote you, they're like telemarketers who moonlight running the government. And then in Seattle, we had a sort of a train wreck when the very liberal city council put before the voters a ballot measure that would have implemented a public campaign finance system. And the voters turned it down, but by a very narrow margin. And I felt foolish, giant, missed opportunity. I had not engaged. I assumed that it would pass. I think a lot of people did. I turned a lot of my attention at that point to what can we do to remedy that situation to make up for that failure? The fact that many democracy reformers in Seattle had not paid attention to this measure that the council had put in good faith before the voters and the voters had narrowly turned down. I think we only missed it by 1500 votes out of several hundred thousand cast. And there was just not much of an organized campaign for it.

What was the nature of the reform that they tried to pass?

So not to go too deep into the Balkan like history of democracy reform in the city of Seattle, but over decades there had been a whole bunch of different plans and proposals and commissions and so on and so forth. In 2013, the city council put before the voters a proposal to adopt a system of public campaign funding just for council races. That is ignoring the two executive branch positions that are elected, the mayor and the city attorney. And to base it on New York's system, which is called a supermatch, where for every $50 contribution that an individual makes, the city Campaign Finance authority would provide some multiple of that. In Seattle, they think the formula was about a six fold increase. It's a pretty darn good system and it should have been adopted, but the council proposed it and the voters didn't go for it. There was a whole lot of other stuff going on at the time in city politics that probably explains why it didn't pass. But remember, city of Seattle is a very reform minded place. Place where the most valuable endorsement is probably the League of Women Voters. It is a city with very high levels of education, with a very high level of trust and surprisingly high levels of trust in local government especially. It votes for, for Democrats almost universally. I think Biden won with 93 or 94% of the vote. So this is a place where the usual American arguments about public campaign finance are not as salient in most places. Why do we want to give government money to politicians? That's not so much the problem here.

Okay, so then you saw this fail. You decided to push for something that was different but similar objective. To remove the power of big money.

Yeah. So voters voted it down. And I went apologetically to the group of young people who had organized the campaign for it and lamented that I didn't help and that so many, apparently a number of other people were doing the same thing. And a coalition began to form. And initially all the coalition did was go go to the city council and ask them to put the same measure back on the ballot and promise this time to be good and organize an actual campaign and send mailers out and go to the forums and speak on behalf of it and activate our activist lists and all the rest. And the council listened seriously and decided not to do that because basically because they had too many other things they wanted from the ballot, and because they said, well, look, that's disrespecting the voters. They just said no, so we're not going to do that. And in a way, that was really good news for us because it put back in this coalition, which is getting bigger and bigger, the opportunity to think bigger and bolder than the council's small plan. Over 2014, the coalition got bigger, and I began pushing hard for us to do something innovative, and that is to try and demonstrate that democracy vouchers could work at the city level.

So it's impossible for me to imagine, but not everybody understands what I'm.

Yeah. So democracy voucher is an idea that I got from you, Larry.

And I had stolen it from people before, so it's not my idea.

I think Bruce Ackerman and one of his co authors there, another law professor, had written about it, and there are probably some. And then probably going back, there were some other theorists who had talked about it. But the idea was. So all public campaign funding systems put aside some pool of money, and then they have some mechanism for distributing it to candidates who qualify. As, you know, because of federal court rulings, public funding of campaigns can't be mandatory for the candidates. It has to be optional. And so part of the challenge of designing a system is to come up with a system that's attractive enough for candidates that they will opt in. So the two main flavors before democracy measures came along first was clean election grants, where you just. If a candidate qualifies, typically by getting lots and lots of signatures and maybe $5 contributions from each of them, then they just get a chunk of money. They just get a check, and they can go run that campaign, and then matching funds are the alternative. I described that already a little bit as what New York did and what was proposed in Seattle. You go out and collect small contributions, and the campaign funding authority will triple match, quadruple match, sex, duple, match them, whatever. The idea of democracy is to take the same PO public money, but to sort of allocate it out in coupons that are sent to voters. In campaign terms, the beauty of this is to eliminate the difference between voter outreach and fundraising. What it tells candidates is just go talk to donors, to voters, but there's no difference anymore. See, just go talk to voters and along the way, try to convince them to vote for you and also to give you their vouchers. It eliminates the distinction between the power of numbers of people and the power of dollars. It no longer is rational for candidates to spend their time dialing for dollars and cozying up to the richest constituents in their district. That's the basic idea of vouchers. There are a number of reasons why it seems especially powerful to me as a strategy. Because in this populist age, it's a time that it is a method that gets the government agency into the background. They actually do have a role. They have to turn the voucher into money for the donor. But it really puts the emphasis on the relationship between candidates and voters. That seemed really powerful to me.

Yeah. So that relationship changes the way candidates run their campaigns. Right. It now becomes important, as you were just saying, to connect to voters early on, because they need to connect to voters to get their money into their system. And so what's interesting about the Seattle story, you've had, I guess not two real cycles of running. Three now. Right, right, right, right. And so what are we learning about what actually happens when campaigns pick this up and use it as a tool?

Yeah, well, gosh, there's a lot of things. The most important thing is that this method works. That is to say, the way we design the system has led to extraordinary participation from candidates. There are a couple of candidates who have not chosen to opt into the system over the three election cycles. And what is it, 16 or 17 different open seats that we've elected with this. But almost all of them have opted into the system, and that's an exceptionally good sign. It is intuitive for voters. They get it, they like it, they understand it. There's been no scandal. My nightmare when designing this system in 2014, 2015, getting ready for a campaign for it, was that we would have some scandal that would tarnish your brainchild, Larry. And that every time any other city or state or ultimately the federal government tries to adopt this, that the story would go through, every news story about how there'd been some scandal in Seattle. We've had no scandal. We've had not a whiff of fraud or abuse or anything else. It's just sort of working great. And we've had a near doubling of how many candidates are running and an increase in the diversity of candidates who are running. And to this day, at least half of the candidates will say, oh, I wouldn't have run without democracy vouchers. The thought of. Yeah. And the reason is they're happy to talk to people, but they don't have a Rolodex full of lawyers and bankers and tech executives. So they know all they have to do is talk to voters and then talk to organizations that include a lot of voters. So to the Sierra Club or the business association in the neighborhood or trade unions, whatever.

Okay, so, but they. But voters then receive a mailing from the city. And the mailing includes really physically coupons, like things you tear out and hand to people. And did you find a lot of people originally just had no idea what this was and kind of threw it away, thinking it was just junk mail they were getting from some scam organization?

Yeah, that's a good question. So the voters of Seattle, as voters across Washington, are used to voting by mail, and they're used to getting official election correspondence in envelopes with a certain appearance. The Seattle vouchers arrived in such an envelope. It looked like official election mail. Certainly some people didn't know what it was, especially the first year, and probably tossed them. But there's a way to get replacement vouchers if you need them. Now. There's a way that you can do it all online. You don't have to have the physical paper anymore, as you did in the very first cycle. We've found that almost everybody in the city now knows about the program. And the total number of people who have used vouchers is now up to maybe 13, 14% of all adults in the city. Now, for people who are not used to working in elections, that may not seem like a very big number, but in fact it's a huge number. So Seattle now has the highest rate of giving to campaigns, including the vouchers ever recorded in the United States. The previous record holder was Vermont, at least that I've ever seen. And they had almost 6% of adults in the state had given to one campaign or another. And in the last election here In Seattle, in 2021, we had 7.6% of adults participating in the donor campaign. In the voucher system, they gave vouchers to someone. It's something like a six fold increase over how many people were giving to campaigns before. This participation leads to other forms of participation. There are academic study that suggests that voter turnout has increased, that volunteerism has increased on the campaigns. People are actually giving more cash as well. In order for candidates to use the vouchers, they have to agree to limit their total spending. But they can still accept small cash contributions, up to $250 for most races or $500 for the mayor's race. There's been a More than doubling in the number of cash donations since before the system. People are giving their vouchers and then they, you know what? I really like that candidate. I'm going to send them a check for 100 bucks. The average size of the cash donations has gone way down, but the number of them has more than doubled since before the voucher system. This is the kind of positive circle that I only dreamed about when we launched the program, was that it would draw people in more deeply. It would get candidates to spend all their time reaching out to voters, would get voters to feel like they had real power. They've got these four coupons that make them feel like the bankers and the tech executives of yore. I just wish we could spread it in more places more quickly.

What's striking about this story is that you had a latent desire to adopt reform that had failed and you could just basically take advantage of that movement. Which means that the argument was really an argument about what's the best way to do what everybody had basically decided, decided should be done. How do you do public funding? You must be involved in these conversations with other cities that are right now considering it. There's been some talk at the state legislature level, but mainly in cities. So we had Oakland that just did it. And LA is very close, I think, to doing the same thing. What is the nature of the conversations you're having with them? Are they people who are skeptical or are they people who see you now as the oracle of ending the corruption of democracy or.

No, being the oracle. That's your job, brother. Let me say just a tiny bit more about my theory of change here. The theory is that in order for an innovative tool to be considered a real option, it has to be demonstrated somewhere. And one of the important reasons for running this campaign in Seattle in 2015 was to demonstrate that this system could work and make it an available off the shelf option for other places. Seattle had a problem in terms of the excess influence of high income neighborhoods and donors. We did a big study before during the campaign that showed that 0.3% of donors were giving two thirds of the money, that they were all coming from view homes in the richest neighborhoods, that it was white, old, rich people with water views were funding all the campaigns in Seattle. Now, in the case of Seattle, these are all probably Obama voters, but still we had a disproportionate influence of the donor class in Seattle. And so we were helping to solve that problem, but we also were demonstrating that you could do it. Seattle had a few things Going for it as well. As I said, we already were used to getting, we have high levels of trust in local government. We had voters who were used to getting official election mail for all their ballots and their voters, guides and all the rest. So getting vouchers in the mail didn't seem unusual. We have the largest vote by mail county in the country at that time. And so they had all the mechanisms in place to verify the identities of the people who were signing their vouchers, the voters. So we actually run the vouchers through the same ballot envelope verification system. We had a lot of the sort of backend. The city also has a strong and well respected election commission that could operate the voucher system. When I looked around and thought about it, I thought, wow, Seattle is kind of the perfect place, place to demonstrate that this can work. Now when we're contacted by folks from other places, they want to know the mechanisms, they want to know, okay, well what do we need to put this in place they no longer want to talk about? Is this winnable? Because it clearly is. We won in Seattle. We came close. Two years later in the state of Washington, I think it was too much too soon. But South Dakota adopted vouchers though. Then the legislature overturned it and then Oakland has done it. Austin came close. There was one other city, Albuquerque came close as well. But now that we've got three full election cycles and a bunch of academic studies, it's no longer just a suggestion from a law professor from a bunch

of us,

but an actual program that's demonstrated. I continue to think that the we'll have more adoption in more places. One thing that happened was that the national momentum around election reform and around democracy reform shifted away from the money theme and on towards gerrymandering and so on with the Trump election. But the money problem didn't go away. I think this will continue to be seen as the cleanest, most ideology neutral strategy.

Yeah, because one thing that's really positive about the system, and I didn't even recognize this when we first was reading about it or writing about it, is that there's a debate among theorists about democracy reform about whether small dollar public funding is actually a good thing. Because there are many people who think, I don't think they're right, but this is what is said, that if you depend on small dollar donors, then you'll get more extremist, more money in because the type of people are going to put up their money, even if it's small dollar, are extremists. And so this doesn't actually deal with the problem of polarization or the problem of politics that's appealing to the extremes, that's amplifying it. But vouchers doesn't. Vouchers doesn't suffer from that problem. Because if you're giving vouchers out to everybody and everybody is equally able to be giving, it's much more likely you're going to have people in the middle who are not the extremists who are giving. Just, you know, there will be extremists giving, but everybody else will as well. So it's a way of having small dollar public funding that doesn't exacerbate the concern about polarization.

I think that's exactly right. I think that's exactly right. We have, you know, donors tend to be the people who are most involved in politics. The people most involved in politics tend to have consistent ideologies, either conservative or progressive or libertarian or green or whatever, whatever. And they tend to move towards the extremes. But what we've seen in Seattle is that the demographic profile of donors is moving closer and closer with each cycle. Each election cycle we've been to, it's moved closer toward simply the demographic profile of voters.

That's really important.

So there used to be huge differences between who the donors were. They were whiter, they were richer, they lived in certain neighborhoods, they had view homes. They were, you could look at the water and Mount Rainier and the demographic profile of the typical voter in the city. What we've seen is that now the donors and the voters are kind of the same people. They're spread all over. Different candidates draw from different voters. So it's really interesting to me that we are not seeing the same core group of X,000 people using their vouchers each cycle. So it's not some sort of hyper political class. There is something like 2/3 of the vouchers. If you look at all three election cycles, something like 2/3 of them are being given by people who have only used their vouchers once. They got excited about one candidate basically from their neighborhood or whatever. The other thing is to. To say is that the opposition, such as there was to the campaign in 2015 when we were pushing for adoption of the vectors in the first place. And this is a great big campaign, I should say, in which I played the role of sort of the policy nerd in the background, but the opposition, such that there was was a worry that this was going to superpower the left in the city of Seattle, that this was a left wing conspiracy. And I Always argued that that was not true. This was a game changer. But it was really about what were the incentives for candidates. That it was a game in which the local chamber of commerce could play just as powerfully as the trade unions. But the incentive was no longer going to be to write the biggest checks. It was going to be to organize enough voters to make it worthwhile to the candidates to come and listen. And that's basically what we've seen. It has changed the game. And we've had certainly very strong progressive candidates running more of them, but we've also had more moderate and centrist candidates running. Now this is Seattle again. The conservative end of the spectrum here is sort of the middle of the American political spectrum. But in most of the elections since we started the voucher system, we've had as many sort of centrist candidates win as further left candidates win. In the most recent cycle, we had sort of a. It was described here as a backlash. I would say it was described sort of a correction toward the center. And those candidates were using vouchers just like all the other candidates. It is a system where we're trying to get the money to reinforce the voting. That is, we want democracy to work so that the elected officials are honest representation of the electorate. I think it's been a success. Now, it doesn't solve everything by any stretch the imagination. Seattle has been like many places flooded with independent expenditure campaigns. It's happened at the same time as the vouchers have been going on. And so some critics say that the vouchers have caused it. I believe it's just separate. It's an exogenous trend that's happening in most places. The big money has figured out they can buy a lot of influence by pouring money in. And there's not a whole lot that they, the city can do about it. There are federal law and constitutional law issues in it.

Yeah. Confused though they may be. But I wonder if there are examples about how candidates are innovating in the process of gathering vouchers. It's not obvious what exactly the right strategy is to maximize the number of vouchers you might have. Are they having block parties? Are they have people going door to door? What's the way that you facilitate the gathering?

Yeah, well, the incentives are all about building your list, finding people, powered organizations, finding influencers. And candidates have gone about it in different ways. I don't think there's a single model that has emerged. But we have seen candidates doing a tremendous amount of door to door, a tremendous amount of Going to the farmer's market or the neighborhood fair and talking to folks. We've seen some candidates hire, well, recruit a lot of canvassers for them to try to collect vouchers. In some cases, they have actually hired canvassers who are trained and quite good at it to try to collect vouchers for folks. And what else? A fair bit of emphasis among incumbents on list building for themselves that makes them especially attentive to membership based organizations with large memberships. In the Seattle case, that would be the Black Lives Matter organizations, the local Sierra Club, the trade unions. But the local business associations do it as well. It's still an evolving space, as you know. Well, Larry, there's a whole sort of industry around politics. There's a cadre of local political consultants and advertisers and campaign treasurers who will come in and help a candidate to navigate this space. And they're all figuring it out too. They were, some of them initially pretty opposed to it because they thought, oh, this is going to mess up our game. But they're figuring out as well about how do you run campaigns that are really people centered?

So if I were a candidate and I wanted to have a block party and I wanted to have a chicken block party, you could come and have chicken and something to drink. Not sure if it could be alcohol or not, but I couldn't say, you can't come in and eat unless you hand me a voucher.

Right?

That would be okay. But I could run that and then say, come and then give a speech. And at the end say, if you want to support me, the easiest way is just to give me one of your vouchers.

That's absolutely right. That's exactly what they do.

That's what they do.

And that's what they do. The doors, that's what they do on the street corners. That's what the campaigns are saying. Here's my pitch. Give me your vouchers. Now. A tremendous amount of the actual giving of the vouchers happens through this online mechanism that the City Election Commission has established. So even though people are receiving their vouchers in the mail, it's not like they're carrying them around or digging them out to take them to the event. And there are substitute voucher forms and all the rest as a transaction, it's become fairly simple for the candidates and for the campaigns. If there's anything that I worry about, actually is that popular candidates max out their voucher supply sometimes quite early. There's a total amount you can spend and you can collect vouchers up to that level, but then the city cuts you off because you've agreed to spend no more than that. Popular candidates in open or heavily contested races, some of them are maxing out by September. Then people want to give them their vouchers, but the vouchers are wasted beyond that point. As we design the 2.0 of this, this is something that we need to think about. City will have to reauthorize the tax that pays for the voucher program before 2025. There's a lot of talk now about how we're going to do that. Will the city council just adopt it or we're going to have to run another initiative again? Well, are we going to have to run a referendum again?

That tax is some property related.

That's right. It's a silly thing. It's the smallest properties tax the city has ever voted on in all of its history. It's $3 million a year, which is 0.065% of the city budget, less than the city spends on arborists. It's ridiculous for the voters of the city to be deciding it's such a small caliber budget item. One state budget writer looked at it and said, alan, this is budget dust. Why are you running an initiative for it? Well, I said that's because the state required us to get voter authorization for this in the first place. But now that it's approved, the city council could just put it in the general fund and pay for it. However, the city is in a bit of a budget pinch. Downtown is kind of empty. Seattle depends heavily on sales tax from downtown commerce. So the budget is crunched a bit and the council may decide to send it to the voters because that would allow them to raise the property tax by this $3 million. Again, this is deep, deep, deep details. I don't think there's any doubt that we're going to continue with the system in Seattle, but we may have to do some work to.

When a campaign that property tax actually triggered a constitutional attack, which I actually was helped with the briefing on, where I guess it's a libertarian organization called the Pacific. What is it called? The Pacific something.

Pacific Legal Foundation, I think said that

it violated the constitution for people to be forced to pay for things they didn't want to pay for, which I've like, wow, that's great. I have a whole list of defense expenditures I'd like to be exempted from because I'm just not too into these to these. But obviously that case went nowhere and seems Pretty solid constitutional foundation. But as you, as you see the strategy, I mean you've done a lot for Seattle, but how do you imagine the strategy spreading? Like how long do we have to stay at the city and Seattle state level? You know, if it was, it was interesting that the for the People act, which was the, you know, the omnibus reform package that would have been the most important democracy reform package passed maybe ever included a really a pilot program for vouchers. But there still were pretty much committed to the idea of the New York model at the federal level. But I wonder when you strategize about

it, what do you, how do you

imagine the quickest path to federal adoption of something like this?

That might be out of my pay grade. I think a lot about city and state adoption because I think that before something can become politically possible, it has to be politically thinkable. And I don't think that at the national level democracy vouchers are yet politically thinkable. The way that you get things to be politically thinkable is you demonstrate them in enough places. So if we look at another reform that sightline. My organization has been very involved in of ranked choice voting and especially multi winner or proportional ranked choice voting. We've now got something like 60 cities and two US states that are using ranked choice voting in regular elections and some presidential primaries in a number of other states. And over the last year we've begun to see that ranked choice voting is now part of the normal political discourse. It's still regarded as kind of weird and new, but it is at least thinkable, I think. So maybe we need to get democracy vouchers to that scale like adoption in scores of cities and a few states. And then I think it maybe dawns on the federal level that it could happen. I mean, it's been in a couple of bills and been mentioned in some presidential candidates platforms. All of this is part of the process of moving something from beyond the pale to within the pale of political thinkability. I mean, I wish there were a shorter path, but I'm not sure what it is.

Well, it seems, I mean, I was particularly depressed with what happened in South Dakota because it's really critical that it becomes something that both the right and the left can point to as important for them. And if it had been in South Dakota and you had that overwhelmingly red state running elections with vouchers, it would have been easy to begin to push it much more broadly. But you know, Seattle is as Seattle as you've described Seattle to be. The same thing with ranked voting. It's ridiculous, but it's perceived in a partisan way because in the two prominent examples of its deployment it displaced a Republican and elected a Democrat. But there's nothing inherent in it to make it like that. So it becomes important to push it in places where it's not partisan.

That's exactly right. And Rancho's voting has parts of the right. The far right has embraced the narrative that ranked choice voting is partisan. But in fact what it did in Alaska was reelect a very conservative Republican governor, reelect a very centrist Republican senator and elect a very conservative, frankly Democrat. She is an Alaska native woman. So. So you would think from

in the

national narrative it would seem like Mary Bozhola was a member of the squad, but she's really not. She's pro oil development. Her positions match very closely those of Lisa Murkowski. And what Ranch's voting Alaska did was empower the independent voters of the state who outnumber the Democrats and the Republican combined. Combined. And let the centrists run the show. Righteous voting elected Eric Adams in the Democratic primary in New York City, not the lefty candidate in that race. It elected Glenn Youngkin in the Republican primary in that case to go on and win the governorship. It's being used now in 23 Utah cities, in most cases red cities.

So in that case, Utah's the great example.

Yeah, I think in the case of red, we've done a better job than with public campaign funding at succeeding and being bipartisan and we desperately needed that South Dakota win and so it does hurt enormously. So just for your listeners, what happened was ballot measure passed, voters approved it and then the state legislature overturned it, threw it out. There was lawsuits and fighting back and forth and ultimately the legislature prevailed. So we have not had yet another win in a red state or city for democracy vouchers. But it seems like that's an important part of the strategy.

Yeah, and I mean South Dakota is kind of funny in this way that it's a really powerful one party state like Massachusetts.

Massachusetts is.

And one party states invite a kind of self dealing inside of the governments in a way that I think that's kind of astonishing. And it's surprising that the people don't in some sense rise up and say what the hell, you know, we are the people and we told you to do this. You, you know, just openly ignore us or reverse us. That, that at some point should be costly but apparently apparently not yet. So when you, when you have sightline has done work in democracy, but not just work in democracy is the commitment now to democracy. I mean, mainly because you're becoming successful. I mean, you've been very successful. One of the most successful organizations pushing democracy reform maybe could inspire other organizations around the country that are similarly progressive in the sense that they're trying to bring about change. Not necessarily ideologically progressive. But do you see this as a model for other organizations like Sightline around the country?

I certainly would hope so. The motive for it, Larry, originally going on 13 years ago, was the recognition that nobody right, left or center was getting good policy adopted. The system wasn't working. We just had gridlock and rising acrimony and hatred. And so someone ought to work on the democracy itself. Someone ought to look at the rules of the game. By that time, we were the largest public policy think tank in the Northwest region. And so we felt like, well, maybe we should look into it a bit. So we started small and gradually it's grown to become one of our larger programs, but still tiny compared to the issue advocacy in the region on other issues that are of great importance to the right or to the left. And we have like, I don't know, three or four full time staff basically working in Alaska, Montana, Washington and Oregon on this and a lot of late nights, but an amazing group of allies and coalitions that we've been able to work with on individual issues. And there's a high level of cost effectiveness. Thank you for crediting Sightline. I think we've been pretty effective. But I would put it to the larger movement in gosh, going back 10 or 11 years, the state of Washington failed to pass a really ambitious climate measure that Siteline had been working on for a really long time. And we were heartbroken about it. But meanwhile, we noticed that education reformers had succeeded finally, after a number of years of effort, maybe 10 years of effort, succeeded in passing a constitutional amendment or referring constitutional amendment to the voters that then passed. They changed the past threshold for school levies from 60% down to 50%, or maybe it was for bonds. The net effect of that over the subsequent century, I expect, will be additional billions of dollars of funding for public schools. That experience like the week of me in my mourning over the climate measure and thinking about what the education reformers had done really convinced me that Siteline ought to be thinking hard about what are the rules and barriers that get in the way of big wins. Maybe if we really care about climate, we ought to be working on democracy vouchers or ranked choice voting or other things that make it possible to actually have A government that works. And that means that we will lose more policy fights, but hopefully we'll also win more policy fights. It's ironic that we have spent a lot of our effort in the last several years working on righteous voting in Alaska, first helping to win it, then implement it, and now to defend it. And arguably what we have done is made the world safe for Lisa Murkowski, with whom we disagree vehemently on climate policy. But I desperately think we need a society, a government in which there are Lisa Murkowski's to argue with in the US Senate over what the right energy policy is. Someone who will fight with us on pipelines and oil extraction, but agree with us that fomenting insurrection is an impeachable offense. Which is what Lisa Murkowski has done. Right?

That's right. That's right. I mean, I've experienced the same thing. You have this kind of aha moment argument with people where, you know, I've, early on in this debate, people would say to me, you know, the really important issue is climate change. And I am somebody who do believe, I do believe the most important issue is climate change. But you know, it doesn't have to be climate change. It could be equality or it could be schools or whatever. But when you get them to recognize how much harder their job is because of the broken democratic system, and you just say to them, what if you didn't have to actually persuade 60% in order to win 50%, what if you could actually just win on the merits as opposed to having to win by raising more money or by persuading the people with the big money? There's this point where they understand the slogan that I've tried to push, which is, it's not that this is the most important issue, it's just the first issue. It's the issue we have to resolve before we can resolve any of these other seriously more important issues. And I think you've demonstrated it. I think the point that you emphasize that I think is so critically important is theorists feel comfortable talking about theory. We feel comfortable reflecting on ideas. And when we become convinced that our ideas right, we just believe, let's just go do it. But most people are not theorists. Most people need to see it, they need to feel it, they need to, they need to understand it and watch it from beginning, middle to end. And so the work you're doing, I think, is the most important work to make reform possible. Because if you show it, if people can see it, then we can point to it and it's not a book, but it's real. And because it's real, it has a real chance to do something. So I'm grateful for the kind words you've given to me. But, Alan, I've always thought of you as such a critical hero in this movement, and we will win eventually. I hope we're around when we get it at the federal level, both of us. But when we do, we can trace the beginning back to this particular moment in Seattle where you felt guilty that you didn't help public funding to get passed, but you actually succeeded in getting something better passed.

Thank you. I will accept that praise on behalf of the hundreds and hundreds of other people in the region that I've been

to work with, of course. Okay. Thank you so much for talking to us and and for your work, and I look forward to more victories that we can celebrate together.

Me too.

This has been the fourth episode of season five of the podcast Another Way. These podcasts are produced in the abstract sense by Equal Citizens, in the literal sense by Josh Elstrow of Elstro Productions. You can find more about Equal Citizens at Equal Citizens Us, and you can give us your thoughts and feedback on that site. We. Okay, so I. I've got to change this in the script because the people running the site always get annoyed with emails. But I love the feedback, especially the ideas for other subjects and other ways of solving the problems we're talking about. So keep it coming. And of course, there too, you can find the ubiquitous red donate button. Everything we do at Equal Citizens requires tiny bit of support. I've got a small staff because I just can't imagine raising money for a large staff. So we keep it as extremely lean

and what I do is pro bono.

But there are expenses and if you could help support them, that would be enormously helpful for keeping these conversations going.

Thanks again.

Stay tuned for the second overturned Tables conversation, which will continue the discussion on vouchers.