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UPDATE, Dec. 4, 2025: The proposed rules discussed in this article were unanimously approved. This article was edited to reflect minor amendments and describe the rules as approved. Two-and-a-half years after a bipartisan bill promised "transformational" changes to Oregon's housing policy, Gov. Tina Kotek's administration has completed the blueprint of that transformation. As approved by a state commission on Thursday, the new housing production rules make Oregon the first US state or Canadian province to create a model statewide zoning code and then apply that statewide code to cities underperforming their peers. Most notably, the state zoning code would much more broadly legalize three- to four-story apartment buildings, especially on smaller parcels in neighborhoods already served by roads and pipes. The system will steer all of Oregon's 58 largest cities, plus those in tourism-heavy Tillamook County, to gradually make their local zoning codes no more restrictive than the state's. But the state standards will essentially become mandatory for cities flagged by the state for permitting fewer total homes, and/or fewer affordable homes, relative to their economic and/or geographic peer cities. Because Oregon has now pre-defined many of the zoning standards it will impose on underperforming cities, various cities may opt to meet those standards sooner as part of their local efforts to accelerate housing production. Known as the "Oregon Housing Needs Analysis," these new rules to accelerate home construction were ordered up by a series of laws in 2019 and 2023, inspired by a similar system in California. And in crafting the OHNA rules, Oregon's state land-use and housing agencies have been aiming to avoid some of the California's model's perceived pitfalls while creating a system that Oregon's many small, cash-strapped cities can readily use. Chris Elmendorf, a law professor at the University of California, Davis, who specializes in state-level zoning and housing statutes, tracked OHNA's administrative rules as they were being written. In an interview Monday, he called them "the next step in the evolution" of laws known as "builder's remedies." Such laws use state power to remove local housing barriers when a city has a local housing shortage. Oregon's new rules follow a national trend toward pre-defining a set of state zoning standards. Oregon pre-defines them more specifically than other states have so far. According to Elmendorf, "Because the rules are known, people can make reasonable decisions about how to plan these projects." Another unique thing about Oregon's approach: It evaluates cities based on actual homebuiliding performance relative to similar jurisdictions. Oregon, Elmendorf said, is "not saying you're subject to this remedial requirement because you didn't write a really pretty plan. You're subject to it because of outcomes. That's conceptually a big step forward." Mary Kyle McCurdy, associate director of the advocacy group 1000 Friends of Oregon, told Sightline, "The OHNA program is the most significant update to Oregon's housing rules since Oregon created its land use goals in 1974. The potential of OHNA is to actually live up to the promise of Goal 10, 'housing,' which is housing for all in every community, at the price point folks need, at the location they need, and the type of housing they need." Among the things OHNA and the associated model zoning code do: In Oregon today, the most common way to ban apartments from apartment zones is by limiting the number of homes a building can include. Take Tualatin, in Portland's southwest suburbs. The city has designated 18 acres near Hedges Creek for "high density apartment or condominium towers." But look in Tualatin's actual code for that zone, and you'll see that although a building on a 10,000-square-foot lot in this area is allowed up to six or seven stories, it could only have a maximum of two homes on it. A lot twice that size can host, at most, ten homes....

For the first seven years of its existence, Portland's inclusionary zoning program seemed to be working like the wrong end of a magnet. Housing projects skidded, twisted, and jumped away from the city's 2017 mandate that a share of homes in most new buildings be sold or rented for less than it had cost to build them. Tens of millions of dollars flowed instead to sites just outside the limits of Oregon's largest city, like the Tigard Triangle and Vancouver waterfront. Multifamily permit filing rates within Portland tumbled 40 percent from their 2016 peak. Portland's new affordable housing mandate wasn't the only factor in this. The city's population growth slowed in these years, then reversed in 2020-22. As a result, rents in Portland have been more or less flat since the huge run-up in Portland home prices that ended in 2017. But among the projects that did continue to flow into the city's permitting pipeline from 2017-2024, there was one very clear sign that the inclusionary zoning program was underperforming: new buildings got smaller. Because the city's program didn't apply to buildings with fewer than 20 homes, one simple way to avoid it was to stick to buildings of fewer than 20 homes, even if larger buildings would have been allowed. In one extreme example, a project came in with thirteen separate buildings just below the threshold. The problem wasn't just that a few developers were finding ways to underbuild; it was that sites like Northbound 30 Collaborative were canaries keeling over in a coal mine. If it was worth it for some projects to contort themselves to escape the program, an unknown number of other mixed-income buildings were completely vanishing from Portland's future. But new data shows that starting in 2024, Portland's affordable housing magnet seems to have flipped around. Immediately after a round of program changes that took effect in March 2024, new private apartment projects started jumping into Portland's affordable housing program. As we reported last year, projects worth hundreds of homes opted into it in the first six months alone. Even more promisingly, the city's trend toward underbuilt projects reversed, with the share of projects just below 20 homes falling sharply. What caused the change? The main difference: Portland funded its mandate. From the day the program launched in February 2017 until the end of February 2024, new mixed-income buildings outside Portland's central city received a relatively modest property tax break, enough to offset some of the revenue lost to discounted rents. But starting in March 2024, the city and Multnomah County both agreed to quintuple the size of that ten-year tax abatement for the neighborhoods ringing downtown. (Within the central city itself, the tax abatement had already been larger.) That balancing of the scales was effectively a subsidy worth something like $220,000 per below-market home, which is less than the $250,000 or so that it would have cost taxpayers to subsidize a comparably priced home in a 100%-affordable building. But in interviews, some homebuilders said it was enough to flip Portland's program from a dealbreaker to a deal-maker. Ian Lewallen of Deacon Development, whose Russell Street Apartments is set to open in 2026 with 16 below-market and 138 market-rate homes told Sightline, "The tax abatement changes were really the big change that brought Portland back in our mind. Without that, frankly we had shut down looking at Portland for 18-24 months. But after that went through in March and April, we started looking at sites." Reacting in June to an earlier look at these numbers, the Portland Housing Bureau's then-director Helmi Hisserich applauded the results of the 2024 reforms. "I am extremely proud of the rigorous work the PHB team put into the inclusionary housing program calibration," said Hisserich. "Local developers have leaned into producing larger housing projects under the updated program rules. … The impact will be felt by Port...

Delays, delays, delays. It takes forever to build the transmission lines that carry power from where it's produced to where people use it. Idaho Power and PacifiCorp can tell you. The two utilities thought they'd be starting construction back in 2018 on the Boardman to Hemingway (B2H) transmission line, which spans 290 miles of Idaho and Oregon. The project broke ground this summer, 19 years after the utilities initially proposed the project. Puget Sound Energy (PSE) can tell you. It flipped the switch on its 16-mile Energize Eastside transmission line upgrade project in 2024, a full six years after the utility needed the line in service to meet customer demand and ten years after the project's launch. State and local permitting alone ate up eight and nine years of each project's respective schedule, from environmental reviews to land use approvals. (B2H also required federal permits, extending the total permitting timeline for that project to more than 15 years.) Even now, three years after Oregon first granted Idaho Power approval to begin construction-a decision now twice upheld by the Oregon Supreme Court-Umatilla County still has not granted the utility all the permits it needs to break ground within its jurisdiction. These holdups don't come cheap. Permitting delays pushed Energize Eastside's project costs up by $52.4 million, increasing the total project budget by 11.5 percent. B2H's cost estimates ballooned by at least $300 million (from $1.0-1.2 billion in a 2018 estimate to $1.5-1.7 billion), at least in part because of permitting delays. And it's not utilities that suffer when projects stall; it's consumers: through higher electricity bills and dirtier, less reliable power. Transmission permitting delays beget higher project costs, and, later on, higher electricity bills in four main ways: When utilities want to build a transmission project, they must find a way to pay for it. Most utilities raise these funds by borrowing from lenders and by attracting investors who buy shares in the company, each expecting a return on their investment. Utilities add these financing charges to the project's construction costs and eventually, with regulatory approval, to customers' monthly bills. To make matters worse for ratepayers, federal utility accounting rules treat financing costs as a capital expense, which means that, in the peculiar universe of utility regulation, utilities get to profit from them. As a result, electricity customers end up paying twice: first through the interest accrued during construction and again when utilities earn a return on that same interest once the project enters the rate base. Put another way, utilities make money on project delays. In fact, utilities profit from -any- permitting-related cost increase, not only financing charges. Let's take an example. The above-mentioned Energize Eastside project by PSE, which upgraded 16 miles of transmission lines stretching between Seattle-area suburbs Renton and Bellevue, will keep power flowing reliably to several growing communities. Permitting delays increased the project's financing costs by $5 million, Sightline estimates, bringing the total permitting-related delay costs to $52.4 million. But Bellevue, Redmond, Renton, and Newcastle's slow approvals of Energize Eastside won't only cost ratepayers $52.4 million. Over 60 years (the approximate average lifespan of a transmission line), due to utilities' regulated rate of return, ratepayers will pay back around $167 million.2 In other words, for every $1 million in costs added to rate base, customers will pay PSE about $3.2 million. Ten years ago, Idaho Power estimated it would be able to energize the B2H line in 2021, enabling the Pacific Northwest and the Intermountain West to better share power, especially during the Northwest's winter peak and the Intermountain West's summer peak. Two years later, it revised that estimate to 2024, citing "ongoing permitting requirements." In its most recent quarter...

In 2024 Alaska Democrats were understandably incensed when Eric Hafner, a convict who had never lived in their state, ran for Alaska's US House seat as a Democrat. State and federal law allowed Hafner to seek the office, and state law let him register with the party he preferred. The state Democratic Party, for its part, could do nothing. It had no way to disavow him or indicate on the ballot its endorsement of incumbent Representative Mary Peltola. Come election day, Hafner got more than 3,500 first-choice votes from Alaskans who saw his name and party on the ballot but presumably had no idea that if elected, he would represent them from a New York prison where he was serving 20 years. Two years earlier, the state Republican Party was the one fuming. Sarah Palin and Nick Begich III, registered Republicans, both on the top-four general election ballot, were feuding on the campaign trail, refusing to cross-endorse each other as co-partisans typically do in ranked choice elections. The state GOP endorsed Begich early and never endorsed Palin. In the general election, Palin and Begich split Republican votes, as expected, pushing the election to Mary Peltola, who became the first Democrat in the seat in 49 years. (Two years later, with Palin out of the picture and New York prisoner Hafner siphoning off Democratic votes from Peltola, Begich reclaimed the post for the GOP.) Now both Republicans and Democrats in Alaska have a beef with a minor flaw in their state's ballot rules that lets candidates claim a party but doesn't let parties claim candidates. The same flaw fusses California and Washington, the two other states that use unified all-candidate primaries. In short, any candidate in these three states can claim any party, potentially confusing voters as to who really represents their values. And political parties can do nothing to stop them. The fix to this problem in all three states is easy: let parties indicate their endorsement of a candidate with two words: "[Democratic or Republican] Nominee." North Americans hate political parties (often including their own), and anti-party sentiment has been prevalent since the Progressive movement more than a hundred years ago. But political scientists concur that for all their disrepute, political parties are the essential intermediaries of democracies everywhere. They aggregate like-minded voters, assemble coalitions that can win, mediate disputes among coalition factions, articulate visions and platforms, and serve as shorthand identifiers on the ballot for time-strapped voters. Indeed, party identification is so valuable that in its absence, many voters lean on unreliable markers such as gender or surname to try to guess which right candidate is right for them. Giving parties space to claim their nominees on ballots in Alaska, California, or Washington would not change the states' election system in fundamental ways, but it would provide voters with more reliable information. Research by political scientist Cheryl Boudreau and her colleagues at the University of California, Davis, shows that informing voters of candidates' party endorsements helps them correctly identify candidates whom they agree with. In an experiment with voters in a nonpartisan mayoral election in which political parties had made endorsements, informing voters of candidates' party endorsements let voters find their best-matched candidate 59 percent of the time, compared to 53 percent of the time when they don't know the parties' endorsements. And that improvement came not with putting the party labels on the ballot but with a mailing sent to voters. A six-point gain in voters' alignment is modest, but in close races it could be decisive. Alaska already sends more information to voters than most states do. The state's Division of Elections prints and mails official voters' guides to all. These guides feature candidates' statements and often include the endorsements they have won from party organizations and w...

A surplus of candidates can ruin any political campaign, and it's happened twice in recent groundbreaking elections in Cascadia. Fortunately, neighboring jurisdictions have demonstrated the solution to this problem: raise filing fees. Alaska and Portland each recently debuted a new, much-anticipated ranked choice voting method. In both places, the trouble was that putting your name on the ballot was so easy (costing less than a tank of gas for a Ford F-150) that the elections were flooded with candidates. The result, in both Alaska and Portland, was an inaugural campaign that tried voters' patience with teeming lists of candidates, many of them narcissistic dreamers with no intention of campaigning, no support from key constituencies, and no chance of winning. One fix to this surplus is simple: charge candidates a filing fee large enough to dissuade dilettantes without deterring contenders. Montana, Alaska's closest cousin among the states, and Portland's urban counterparts in neighboring Washington charge filing fees more than ten times as high. That's why these Cascadian jurisdictions do not attract candidates like fishing derbies draw anglers. Alaska's 2022 inaugural election was run under its top-four law. In top-four, voters choose four finalists in a primary election and then pick among them in a ranked choice voting general election. Voters for an open US House seat confronted a ballot overloaded with 48 candidates (pictured on the website). The state's new election plan was supposed to make things better; instead, voters got a ballot as daunting as The Cheesecake Factory's menu. This race was a special election for the state's sole US House seat, unexpectedly vacated by the death of Rep. Don Young after 49 years in office. The absence of an incumbent and the novelty of the new rules recruited a bumper crop of candidates, and the nominal filing fee of just $100 did nothing to separate the chaff from the grain. For one Benjamin Franklin, you could get your name on every ballot and in every voters' guide in the state and - who knows? - maybe your candidacy would catch fire. However, most did not catch even a spark, and few candidates raised money or ran actual campaigns. Just one-fifth of candidates cracked 2 percent of the vote. At the bottom of the pack, some 19 candidates won fewer than 100 votes each. The same pattern emerged in Portland. The city 's 2024 election was the inaugural run of its new election system, which uses a single round of ranked choice voting for all races. Some 118 candidates surged into municipal contests. City Council Districts 3 and 4 each had 30 candidates for their three seats. (See sample ballots in the online version of this article.) Such races make voting a morass and campaigning a Black Friday crowd scene. At some debates, each candidate got speaking time measured in seconds. In the end, as in Alaska, voters ignored most candidates. In District 4, for example, only 11 voters picked L Christopher Regis. He had enough support to field a kickball team in one of Portland's adult co-ed leagues but fell 11,251 votes short of winning a council seat. Regis was not alone. In Districts 3 and 4 combined, only a quarter of candidates crossed the 2 percent threshold. Most of the also-rans did not actually run. They just made the process of voting feel like scrolling through the dross on Netflix. The sudden opening of every elected office in the city, all at the same time, brought the crush of candidates. Empty chairs attract aspirants. What's more, excitement about the new system itself drew participation, making more candidates believe they could compete. But the fact that securing a spot on the ballot cost nothing but $75 for council or $100 for mayor amplified the gold rush spirit. Low filing fees for open seats elsewhere have also attracted swollen fields of candidates. In 2003, for example, a special election recalled the sitting governor of California, Gray Davis, and voters' plurality winne...

When six-term US Senator Patty Murray is up for reelection in 2028, the Washington state leader will be 78 years old. If she does not retire on her own, she may well find herself challenged by younger Democrats, as is now happening to 79-year-old Senator Ed Markey of Massachusetts. Gerontocracy is out of vogue among Democrats; many blame their party's loss of the presidency on 81-year-old Joe Biden's delay in stepping aside. If Murray forgoes the race, expect a stampede of eager Democrats hoping to succeed her. Her seat has not been vacant since 1992, so every ambitious politician in the Evergreen State will be eyeing it. Indeed, during her 2022 run for reelection, when no other big-name Democrats entered the race, Murray still drew 17 primary challengers. In Alaska that same year, when a US House seat opened for the first time in decades upon the death of Rep. Don Young, who held the office for 49 years, some 48 candidates threw their hats into the ring. Imagine how many will file if (and when) Murray steps aside. The line of Democratic contenders could resemble the throngs of hikers on the trail to Camp Muir on a summer weekend. In other words, it will practically be a mob scene. Unlike in Alaska's pioneering election system, though, platoons of candidates can be a problem in Washington - a big problem. That's because Washington's unusual top-two elections are haunted by a mathematical anomaly that could hand Murray's seat to a Republican, even in deep-blue Washington. Fortunately there are fixes, and one of them is about to debut in Seattle: unaltered top-two in general elections combined with a targeted occasional use of ranked choice voting in certain overcrowded primary elections. (For brevity, we'll call it "ranked top-two.") If the state legislature adopts this Seattle plan in 2026, it could be up and running statewide in time for the August 2028 US Senate primary. To understand ranked top-two, you need to understand the anomaly, in which top-two misfires and elects a less-popular candidate over a more-popular one. The easiest way to understand it is through the 2024 election of Dave Upthegrove, a veteran Democrat, to the state's public lands commissioner post. In that race, Upthegrove came within a hair's breadth of losing the primary, in which two Republicans and five Democrats faced off. The five Democrats gained 57 percent of the 1.9 million votes cast, but they divided their share many ways. During most of the vote-counting process, the two Republicans led, with 22 percent for Jaime Herrera Beutler and 21 percent for Sue Kuehl Pederson. Only when the final batch of ballots was tallied, days after the election, did Upthegrove's count exceed Pederson's - and by only 49 votes. Had he fallen short, the general election would have been between Republicans Beutler and Pederson, and one of them would be holding the office now. Instead, after clearing the primary, Upthegrove quickly consolidated Democrats' support and won the general with a five-point margin. A similar scenario unfolded in 2016, when three Democrats split the field for state treasurer, two Republicans advanced to the general election, and the state elected one of them, Duane Davidson. What's more, Davidson, who ended up being a one-term office holder, was the only Republican in that seat in six decades. The same thing could happen in an open US Senate race in 2028: a huge field of Democrats could hand the race to two Republicans. The Upthegrove anomaly in top-two is specific and mathematical. It's not just that both finalists are from the same party. That's normal in districts that lean red or blue. For instance, of the nine races for open congressional seats in Washington since the advent of top-two in 2008, three of them have paired two members of the same party. Most recently, in 2020, Marilyn Strickland and Beth Doglio, both Democrats, competed for the US House seat in District 10. Indeed, such same-party runoffs are a feature of top-two, not a bug...

If you had a chance to overhaul your government, where would you begin? Last year, 38 Yukoners from every corner of the territory stepped up to answer that question in a citizens' assembly on electoral reform. Their recommendation? Upgrade the Yukon Legislative Assembly's first-past-the-post elections to ranked voting, much like Alaskans did in 2020. Voting is already underway for a statewide plebiscite on the assembly's reform of choice. Though the vote is advisory, two of the Yukon's three major parties have committed to respecting the will of the voters if they win control of the assembly this year. So, will the reform that let Alaskans vote their values and produced a more politically diverse and functional legislature inspire a similar change in the Yukon? Residents will know more after polls close at 8:00 p.m. on November 3. In general elections, rather than filling in a single ballot bubble for a candidate for member of the legislative assembly (MLA) in their district, voters could rank party nominees in order of preference, starting with their first choice for MLA, then second, and so on. If no candidate were to win a majority in the first round of tallying, officials would eliminate the lowest-performing candidate, redistributing their votes to voters' second choices. The process would continue until a candidate won a majority, or as close to a majority as possible. (Elections Yukon has an overview on their website.) In general elections, rather than filling in a single ballot bubble for a candidate for member of the legislative assembly (MLA) in their district, voters could rank party nominees in order of preference, starting with their first choice for MLA, then second, and so on.2 If no candidate were to win a majority in the first round of tallying, officials would eliminate the lowest-performing candidate, redistributing their votes to voters' second choices. The process would continue until a candidate won a majority, or as close to a majority as possible. Elections Yukon has published an overview here. In Alaska, the ranked voting upgrade has prevented "spoiled" elections, given voters more viable choices, encouraged candidates to work toward common goals, and created a cross-partisan, solutions-focused legislature. Though the Yukon's governmental structure and political makeup differ from Alaska, similar dynamics and incentives would likely carry over. In general elections, the Yukon's single-member electoral districts are prone to the same plurality winner problem that prompted Alaskans to adopt ranked voting in the first place. When there are more than two candidates in the running, as has been the case in 94 percent of general election assembly contests since 2000, voting blocs may fracture. If like-minded voters split their vote between two similar candidates, a conservative district can send a liberal MLA to office (or vice versa) with only plurality support - more votes than anyone else, but not reflective of majority preference. As such, voters may feel compelled to vote strategically, rather than for their favorite candidate, to avoid splitting the vote. At its most extreme, vote-splitting can deliver one party a number of seats that is vastly out of line with what the voters wanted. Take for example the 2001 British Columbia general election. BC Liberals won 97 percent of seats in the provincial assembly with only 58 percent of the popular vote, all because the NDP and Green Party divvied up a similar voter base. Could the same thing happen in the Yukon? To some degree, it already does; just not to the benefit of any one party. For the last three elections, MLAs who got less than 50 percent of the vote in their district won well over half of assembly seats: 12 members in the 2021 election, 17 members in 2016, and 16 in 2011. In other words, it's possible for every riding to go the way of Kluane, where MLA Wade Istchenko has won three consecutive elections even though most voters preferred other can...

Speed matters. And to people looking for a home today, it matters a great deal whether that home is built next year, or in ten. If Cascadia's leaders really believed in speed, then they would focus more on re-legalizing small, neighborhood-size buildings with 6 to 12 homes each. But despite recent reforms, small apartment buildings remain illegal almost everywhere in Cascadian cities and across North America. Meanwhile, advocates and leaders in the region have legalized medium-sized and large apartment buildings via transit-oriented development, which smartly co-locates new apartment homes alongside transit infrastructure. California now allows up to 9 stories next to major transit stops, Washington up to 6, and British Columbia up to 20. This is praiseworthy progress, but it's limited to larger buildings that will take many years to plan and build. An example from our pro-housing forbearers illustrates just how long we might wait for larger projects to materialize: in 2014, 31-year-old Graham Jones spoke hopefully to Vancouver City Council and then-Mayor Gregor Robertson, pleading for more homes at the old Oakridge Mall site. Jones asked council to, quote "please consider that this project will be phased in over the next 10-15 years. It will represent current city residents, but also many who are not represented today," endquote. That was 11 years ago; Robertson is now the federal housing minister; and no one has yet moved into the Oakridge development. The fastest way - the only fast way - to build a lot of homes is simple: re-legalize small apartment buildings, generally no taller than a mature tree, in all neighborhoods, just like they used to be. All other solutions ask today's beleaguered 31-year-olds to wait many years to see results. For politicians working within four-year electoral windows, moving fast means thinking small. It's the only way to deliver the new homes their constituents need within a single term of office. Small apartment buildings have been all but illegal to build here in Vancouver for nearly a century. City leaders began implementing zoning restrictions in the 1920s "largely to prevent the intrusion of apartment houses in single- or two-family areas," wrote Harland Bartholomew, who drew Vancouver's first zoning map. In the US, the Supreme Court justified zoning regulations in 1926, writing: "the apartment house is a mere parasite." As a result, much of Vancouver's planning energy has gone into transit-oriented towers, often on old industrial sites, limiting new homes to fewer centralized nodes. This political compromise has been in place locally for decades, known as The Grand Bargain: exclusively zoned land remains so, while towers on busy streets accommodate some growth, aka "high-rise density, low-scale suburbia, little in between." The Grand Bargain promises new homes. Just not built quickly, or in the nicest places, or at the lowest cost. It's an attempted sleight of hand by civic leaders: they promise greater access to nice homes in desirable neighborhoods, but they deliver large apartment buildings, slowly, on just 10 percent of the city's land. Large apartment buildings on busy streets are wonderful; this article was written in one. But zoning that proscribes the housing types between towers and single-detached homes leaves much of the land in our cities off-limits - and many residents or would-be residents without affordable options to call home. The redevelopment of False Creek's north shore by Concord Pacific is Vancouver's largest and most significant example of Grand Bargain planning. It was a visionary project that reshaped the city for the better and gave Vancouver its iconic skyline. But this project also underlines how long even successful megaprojects can take to deliver the full measure of homes they promise. At the site's eastern end, fully 40 years after it broke ground, 380,000 square feet of prime, waterfront land still sit barren and undeveloped. A similar story has played...

On September 4, 2024, Democrats across Washington State let out a collective sigh of relief. A recount of the primary election finally confirmed that one of their own, then-King County Councilor Dave Upthegrove, would appear on the November ballot. Even though Democrats had won 270,000 more votes than Republicans in the primary for Commissioner of Public Lands, Upthegrove squeaked into second place by just 49 votes. This math story problem gone awry is a hiccup of Washington's top-two primaries, in which the two candidates with the most votes, regardless of party, square off in the general election. Democratic voters split their majority five ways, allowing two Republicans to float toward the top of the pool with a combined 43 percent of the vote. Only the narrowest of margins spared blue-leaning Washington an all-Republican ticket in the general election. (It wouldn't have been the first time.) So do Washington's nonpartisan top-two primaries need to go? Certainly not. Two decades of research point to their overall positive impact on elections and governance. Compared with the 47 states that use partisan primaries, the top-two model has a depolarizing effect on lawmakers, gives candidates an incentive to appeal to wider audiences, and turns out a more representative electorate. But while Washingtonians could claim for years to be leading the pack on primary reform, the top-two model has also stumbled, occasionally producing backward results and unfavorable conditions for third parties. Since 2020, Alaska's top-four primaries and ranked choice general elections have avoided top-two's tripping points while still retaining and building on its positive qualities. Washington's not down and out by any means; with a simple top-four (or top-five) tune-up, Evergreen state voters could get the same results. In 2004, Washington voters approved Initiative 872, which created top-two unified (or nonpartisan) primaries. In these races, all candidates appear on the ballot together and the top two vote-getters (of any party) advance to the general election. California adopted the model six years later. Most states hold partisan primaries, which are exclusive to candidates of a given major party and tend to produce combative campaigns and extreme legislators. But reformers theorized that unifying the races - i.e., making them nonpartisan and allowing all voters to participate - would produce more moderate legislators who better represented the majority of voters. They were right. Political polarization stabilized in the California and Washington legislatures post-reform while the problem worsened in most states with partisan primaries. Why such a dramatic difference? For one thing, unified primaries tend to turn out more voters that better represent the overall electorate than partisan primaries, which skew older, whiter, wealthier, and, some researchers suggest, more ideologically extreme than those who show up for general elections. Because Washington's unified primary voters look more like the general voting public than most other states, candidates and lawmakers have cause to court voters from all sides (not just a narrow base) to secure one of the top two spots. Another key element is that the top two candidates regardless of party advance out of the primary. Two Democrats or two Republicans can face off in the general election if an area skews heavily toward either party. Voters of the dominant party get more options in the general election, while voters in the political minority can sometimes "play kingmaker," putting a more moderate candidate over the top. There's no better illustration of the dynamics top-two has introduced than Washington's Fourth Congressional District. About 60 percent of voters in the district backed Donald Trump in 2016, 2020, and 2024. But Rep. Dan Newhouse, one of only two US House Republicans to vote to impeach Donald Trump and win reelection in 2022, has won out over a more conservative fellow Republican i...

In 2024, Democrat-endorsed candidates swept all seven seats on the Bend Oregon, city council - even though city elections are technically nonpartisan. Democrats certainly outnumber Republicans in Bend, but 20 percent of city voters are registered with the G.O.P., and many more are not affiliated or are registered with smaller parties. Those voters don't get their views represented in their city government. In southern Oregon's Jackson County, the representation failure is reversed. Democratic or Independent candidates have won more than 40 percent of the vote for every county commissioner contest over the last five general elections - but Republicans consistently hold all three seats. Even though county voters are split between the two major parties, Democrats are locked out of county policy decisions. Sightline catalogued voting methods in all Oregon counties and the 50 most populous cities (view and download the list here). The findings: Almost all of Oregon's cities and counties operate with election methods that tend to fall into the same pattern of misrepresentation. These local governments use outdated, easily gamed voting methods. Fortunately, Oregon's constitution, unlike those of neighboring states, enables localities to choose a more effective path: proportional representation. Nearly all local governments in Oregon - every county and all but one of the state's 50 largest cities - use one of three methods of electing councils and commissions, or some combination. While each of them can, and often does, achieve adequate representation for residents, all three are susceptible to political manipulation and to oscillation between political extremes. Bloc voting can shift governing bodies wholesale based on whatever group turns out the most voters. At-large positions similarly give majority viewpoints unfair sway and set up additional avenues for political gamesmanship. And single-winner wards (or districts) put voters at the mercy of artificial lines, including gerrymandering. Voters in more than one-third of Oregon's 50 largest cities and many more smaller towns, from Baker City to Yachats and Lake Oswego to Redmond, are familiar with bloc voting, even if they don't know it by name; it's a common method for electing multiple people to city council at once. But those candidates are not assured to reflect the diversity of public preferences. With bloc voting, voters get the same number of votes as there are council seats up for election. In a three-seat election, for example, voters pick their three choices from the list of all candidates, and the three with the most votes win spots on the council. Some cities use bloc voting for all seats at once, while others elect some of their members in midterm years and the rest in presidential years. Bloc voting might seem like a simple method - choose three, elect three - but the outcomes can belie what voting is supposed to achieve. Instead of electing a council that can represent everyone, whichever group or faction gets the most votes can easily win all the seats. In partisan elections, bloc voting frequently means that the party with the most votes sweeps the board; in nonpartisan elections, candidates on either side of local wedge issues (like police funding or low-income housing) might win every single position even if voters are closely divided. A small shift in voter preference can flip half or all of a local council, so residents might have to endure dramatic policy swings; a policing or housing ordinance adopted one year could be reversed the next. Plus, when votes are close, there's no guarantee that the top vote-getters are actually the most popular candidates. Take the city of Forest Grove, for example. In 2024, six candidates ran for the three open seats in a bloc voting election, and all received between 12 and 19 percent of the vote. The third-place winner, Brian Schimmel, beat out next-place runner-up, Peter Truax, by less than half a percentage point. With few...

The Maine family needed a cheaper place for one of them to live. And quickly. It was 2024. Synia Maine, 56, had just developed a back injury so severe that she had to retire from her career as a hairstylist a decade earlier than planned. Suddenly, she had increased medical bills and no income. Her daughter-in-law, Ember DeVaul, recounted that they'd explored multiple options to try to keep Synia in Arizona, where she lived. Even the lowest-cost housing option, manufactured homes, required a permanent foundation and tens of thousands of dollars in permitting costs. Ember and her husband, who live in East Portland, looked into converting their own garage into housing. Only one contractor bothered to reply to them after they stated their budget was just $100,000. The verdict? It would take $150,000 minimum to convert the garage, but the resale value of the property would only increase by half that amount. Another issue was the estimated six months to get through design and permitting. "We didn't have time to wait," Ember said. Because Synia was an independent contractor, she didn't have health insurance, and she had used up her savings just to keep up with the bills. "It's crazy how fast everything can change," said Ember. Kol Peterson, the sole contractor who showed up at Ember's home, proposed another idea: a tiny home on wheels. Unlike a traditional backyard cottage, tiny homes on wheels and recreational vehicles (RVs) are legally considered vehicles. This means that they aren't subject to the building permit process and its associated fees. All that the city requires is an additional utility connection, or access to the main house if the external dwelling doesn't have internal plumbing. "It ended up being realistically our only option, other than her being homeless, really," said Ember. Synia ended up settling on a park model RV, which is larger and designed as a long-term residence rather than for cross-country voyages. Even with upgrades like four-season insulation and a 35-year warranty on the roof, the total cost came to $104,000. Adding the water and sewer connection only cost another $5,000. The new home is being delivered in mid-September. Though it's intended to be permanent, the fact that it could move elsewhere in the future made everyone more comfortable. Ember recalled, "She is just so scared of being a burden. If she doesn't want to live with us anymore, she can take it somewhere else and not feel indebted to us." Synia is lucky that her son and daughter-in-law moved to Portland five years ago. It's possibly the only city in the United States that has fully legalized living in wheeled dwellings on residential lots instead of just within commercial RV parks. In both of the Arizona cities where Synia's other daughters live, Synia's new living arrangement would be illegal, as it is in the vast majority of North American jurisdictions. Portland first started creating a legal pathway to this low-cost shelter option in 2017, after Luz Gomez, an immigrant from Honduras, brought a spotlight to the issue alongside the Leaven Community, a faith group in NE Portland she was involved with. At the time it was estimated that at least 100 of these homes already existed illegally, and their residents could lose their homes if neighbors reported them. City Commissioner Eudaly, elected to city council as a housing advocate, directed the Bureau of Development Services to stop enforcing prohibitions against them in 2017. Four years later, Portland passed an ordinance fully legalizing tiny homes on wheels and RVs as permanent housing options on residential lots with an existing home. Because so little paperwork is required, there is no official count of how many Portlanders live in homes on wheels. But it's likely more common than people realize. Peterson, the contractor who worked on Synia's project, counted more tiny homes on wheels and occupied RVs in his neighborhood than traditional ADUs on foundations back in 2020. In other ...

Meeting Cascadia's climate goals will require millions of households to stop burning fossil fuels for warmth. In Oregon and Washington, buildings emit more pollution than any other sector besides transportation. (The building sector is the third highest emitting in British Columbia and Idaho, and fifth in Montana.) Heat pumps powered by renewable electricity are what the International Energy Agency calls the "proven technology of choice to decarbonize heating," and several Cascadian jurisdictions are working hard to expand access to the technology. Oregon, for example, set itself a goal of heat pumps accounting for 65 percent of new residential heating, cooling, and water heating equipment sales by 2030. British Columbia resolved for all new space and water heating equipment sales and installations to be at least 100 percent efficient by 2030, a standard that favors heat pumps, which can exceed this threshold. Heat pumps have now outsold gas furnaces and central air conditioners for two consecutive years in Cascadia; nearly three heat pumps sold for every two gas furnaces in 2023. Still, heat pumps are prohibitively expensive in upfront costs, and that fact, coupled with tightening public budgets, could threaten their rapid scale-up, especially among low-income families. In this challenging context, leaders in Cascadia would do well to direct their limited treasuries of funds for public subsidies toward low-income households for whom heat pumps offer the biggest reductions in both utility bills and greenhouse gas emissions. At the same time, policymakers can support creative funding models, such as tariffed on-bill investments and green banks, to help more households get heat pumps installed. They can also strengthen building codes to ensure heat pumps are installed in new homes, avoiding costly future retrofits. This multi-pronged approach stretches scarce public dollars, while still reaching families that stand to benefit most from these clean, cost-saving, and comfortable systems. Many families, particularly those with low incomes, cannot afford heat pumps. A medium-efficiency heat pump can cost between $14,000 and $22,000 in Cascadian states. The median heat pump costs $8,200 more than installing fossil-fuel heating equipment (such as a gas boiler) and air conditioning in Oregon; in Montana, that figure is $16,200. Steep costs stem from expensive manufacturing and labor, installer shortages and inexperience, the need for electrical upgrades in some homes, and the added cost of backup heating systems where required. Governments have stepped in to help. The 2022 Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) provides rebates of up to $8,000 for low-income households purchasing medium- or high-efficiency heat pumps. These rebates have so far withstood roll-back attempts by the Trump administration; Oregon and Washington have already secured hundreds of millions of federal dollars to launch their rebate programs. (Montana has paused its rebate rollout, while Idaho has provided no public timeline.) But the IRA rebates are a one-time, capped allocation, and the Trump administration eliminated tax incentives for energy-efficient home improvements in July 2025, including heat pumps. States and provinces also subsidize heat pumps, but tight budgets have led to substantial cutbacks. Washington scaled back funding for heat pump programs from $80 million in the 2023 budget cycle to $30 million in 2025. Oregon lawmakers appropriated $25 million to heat pump rebates in 2022 and added another $4 million in 2024, but allocated no new funds in 2025. British Columbia lowered its heat pump program budget from Can$150 million in 2024 to Can$50 million in 2025. (Idaho and Montana do not offer any state-funded heat pump rebates.) Several utilities in the region chip in heat pump rebates of their own, though amounts tend to be modest. For example, Puget Sound Energy offers $3,900 rebates to low-income households, and Idaho Power offers $500. Crucial as they a...

Cascadia's transition to safe, healthy, gas-free homes and businesses is not moving quickly enough, and the region's gas utilities bear much of the blame. Consider a few recent examples: In 2022 Oregon's gas utilities sued the state over its landmark Climate Protection Program, setting back implementation by at least a year. In 2023 NW Natural funded a campaign in Eugene, Oregon, to repeal the city's ban on gas hookups in new residential buildings. In 2024 Cascade Natural Gas and NW Natural supported ballot initiative 2066 to keep Washington state hooked on gas, including by restricting the state's ability to incentivize electric heat pumps in new construction. The measure may now be headed to the state supreme court, after voters narrowly approved it and then the King County Superior Court overturned it. Allowing gas utilities to explore new climate-friendly business models such as thermal energy networks (TENs) could soften their stance on decarbonization. But here, too, momentum has been halting. An Oregon bill to establish TENs pilot projects stalled in the Joint Ways and Means committee this year. The gas sector's slow-walk on climate progress demands more transformative ideas. One that surfaces from time to time among advocates is transferring gas utilities to public ownership. It's a common model in Cascadia for electric utilities, and one that could theoretically speed electrification by removing utilities' profit motive and making companies more accountable to the public. What we found, though, is that publicly owned gas utilities in the United States aren't moving faster toward decarbonization than their privately owned counterparts. That's likely because they face many of the same misaligned incentives and lax climate policies as their for-profit counterparts. In much of Cascadia, too, public gas utilities (there are a few) do not serve customers that want to shut them down. That's to say nothing of the practical and financial challenges of transferring aging fossil fuel infrastructure to government ownership The good news, though, is that both those ingredients - the policy context in which they operate and the desires of the public they serve - can change, and they don't depend on first altering gas utility ownership structure. A slew of effective policies is already at work and available to copy-paste from more climate-forward places, namely the Netherlands and Denmark. Those countries do own their gas utilities, but that's not a prerequisite when it comes to decarbonization. Rather, it's their exceptionally strong gas transition policies that can apply to any type of utility, including the investor-owned companies prevalent in Cascadia today. The takeaway: Cascadians can spare themselves the immensely challenging campaign of trying to take over the region's investor-owned companies and instead focus on pushing the measures that are already succeeding elsewhere. Which of course means a faster path off gas and toward the cleaner, healthier homes and businesses. Government ownership of utilities is nothing new to Cascadia. More than 110 publicly owned electric utilities dot the region, ranging from the tiny City of Rupert Electric in Idaho, with 3,200 customers, to the gargantuan HydroBC in British Columbia, which serves more than 2.2 million customers (95 percent of provincial residents). Customers of publicly owned electric utilities in the United States tend to enjoy lower rates and more reliable electricity than customers of other types of utilities, according to US Energy Information Agency data analyzed by the American Public Power Association. For these reasons and more, community members and activists have pushed for public takeover of privately owned electric companies in the Northwest and beyond. Cascadia added two publicly owned electric utilities in the past 25 years: Jefferson County Public Utility District, which split from Puget Sound Energy (PSE) in 2008, in northwest Washington, and Hermiston En...

With 57 percent in favor of Proposition 1 (and 150,000 ballots in; last updated August 7, 2025), Seattle voters have reaffirmed their commitment to advancing a more democratic city government. Seattle's iconic Democracy Voucher Program will have funding for another ten years. This renewal means the city can continue to lead the way in the share of its population who contribute to city campaigns. Candidates will keep having more reasons to knock on doors rather than spend hours a day calling up the wealthiest people they know to fund their campaigns. And Seattle residents will get more choices in their elections and more power to express their views. Along with helping to design the initial policy, Sightline has documented the impressive effects from the program's first decade: The program has unlocked an "incredible explosion in participation" in campaign funding and empowered a much more representative group of people to become donors. It decreased large donations and elevated small ones, and it pushed away money coming from outside the city. For example, before the program was implemented, in the 2013 election cycle, gifts of $400 or more made up almost 60 percent of campaign dollars; in 2023, those large contributions plummeted to 9 percent of funds. The program even helped boost voter turnout, likely because of increased personal touches from candidates. While it couldn't put a damper on dark money (no one can, thanks to US Supreme Court cases including Buckley v. Valeo, Citizen United v. FEC, and McCutcheon v. FEC), the program also didn't cause a spike in those "independent expenditures" - PAC spending is up everywhere. Democracy vouchers have encouraged more diverse candidates to run and given them a pathway to win. Almost all viable candidates have participated in the program since it began, including people with viewpoints across Seattle's political spectrum. The program has done all that with "budget dust," a portion of the city budget you need a magnifying glass to see in a chart. Tuesday's vote shows Seattleites' confidence in the program and belief in the importance of doing everything possible to make their government representative and accountable. City residents face many daily challenges - and the stronger and more democratic our governments, the better equipped they are to understand and respond to what's happening in people's lives. One component of the measure that passed is a directive for the mayor, city council, and the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission (the SEEC, the entity that manages the program) to convene a workgroup to explore potential improvements to the program. While the SEEC has already tweaked some elements based on ongoing feedback, the workgroup will offer a more defined process for additional recommendations, considering input from candidates, campaign staff, consultants, advocates, and the SEEC. Commentators have already pointed to spending caps for possible modification, particularly given the large number of PAC funds that enter city races. Others have suggested shifting the timing of voucher mailings, improving outreach, and allowing candidates into apartment buildings to meet voters. Some might look beyond the program to other ideas for making political donors more accountable, perhaps following Maine's example (currently moving through the courts) to limit donations to super PACs. Future city elections will get another boost toward fairer representation: Seattle will start using ranked choice voting in city primaries in 2027, the next local primary election. Ranked choice voting offers similar voter-centric benefits as democracy vouchers: candidates benefit from knocking on more doors and talking to more voters because they seek out second-choice votes as well as first choices; more diverse candidates tend to run and win, because voters don't have to just pick the popular option while others get squeezed out; and voters get a more nuanced way to express their political choi...

Editor's introduction: John Vaillant is a Cascadian icon. An award-winning and bestselling author residing in Vancouver, British Columbia, he has written gripping tales, both fiction and nonfiction, on the nuanced interfaces between people and nature. Vaillant's 2023 Pulitzer finalist book Fire Weather: On the Front Lines of a Burning World recounted the harrowing 2016 megafire in the Alberta oil town of Fort McMurray, weaving in the histories of the oil industry, climate science, and the very technology of fire in human history. His account not only won international praise; it also drove urgent conversations about our new age of ultra-destructive, climate-fueled wildfires - a topic Sightline has also researched. Below, John Vaillant shares his reflections on developments since publishing Fire Weather, answering questions from Sightline researchers. The Los Angeles fires this past January were a signal event that forced twenty-first century wildland-urban interface fire and urban conflagration into the international consciousness with a new urgency. The size and speed of it, combined with the scale of the evacuation (about 200,000 people), the structure loss (16,000+), the cost (likely over a hundred billion dollars when all is said and done), and the death toll (30) shocked the nation. I happened to be in Orange Country when those fires broke out, and I did more media interviews than I've ever done in my life. Those fires, as intense and destructive as they were, were "out of season," implying that there is no longer a fixed "fire season," but rather "fire weather," which can now occur almost any time (see the hundreds of fires that burned across the Northeast last November). That said, it's summertime now, and huge, stubborn fires are wreaking havoc in the heart of Canada, and across the American West. Particularly intense fires, burning in record-breaking temperatures, have been destroying property and also causing fatalities across the eastern Mediterranean. Years - and in some places, decades - of prolonged drought have made many northern and western forests much more fire-prone. Milder winters, elevated summer heat, and year-round drought conditions have also enabled a variety of insects to kill or weaken vast swathes of forest, increasing flammability and transforming historic carbon sinks, like Canada's boreal forest, into net carbon emitters. Meanwhile, as highly flammable, petrochemical-heavy modern homes push deeper into the wildland-urban interface (WUI) in search of the "neighborhood in Nature" sweet spot, more and more structures are exposed to wildfire energy and embers. As I've been learning on my now-global Fire Weather tour, communities are at very different stages of awareness and/or preparatory action, ranging from high (Hornby Island, BC; Steamboat Springs, CO) to low (Lucca, Italy; Cambridge, UK; Jaipur, India). Individuals have taken some of the messages from Fire Weather (and their own hard-won experience) to heart, abandoning synthetic (petroleum-based) clothes, gas-powered vehicles, and/or urging their town councils to build alternative routes out of their dead-end valley communities. The biggest surprise is how fast it's happening, and how broadly. The petroleum industry, which is still insured, is destroying what was a very lucrative twentieth-century business: if you're an insurance company pulling coverage from vast swaths of the country, you may be reducing your exposure, but you're not making any money from policies either. You have to wonder if the industry is connecting these dots in a meaningful way . . . Fire Wise (FireSmart in Canada) is a really good local program that operates through local fire departments. I think every local solution, from yard planting choices, to external sprinklers, to alternate escape routes, to fire preparedness guides can be scaled to policy level. What makes this hard and slow is that it requires a shift in consciousness and these, like attitudes toward litt...

Over the last eight years, a bipartisan coalition of Oregon lawmakers has led North America on a new trend: state-level zoning. As zoning restrictions spread across the continent almost exactly 100 years ago, state and provincial governments mostly delegated to cities all decisions about where and what sorts of housing should be allowed locally. During the century that followed, that led to problems. A big one: cities and towns deployed zoning to gradually ban the rooming houses, duplexes, triplexes, and small-scale apartment buildings that had always been, until then, the places you could live when you had a small household or a tight budget. At first, this wasn't an obvious problem. A city banning apartments might reason that inexpensive homes would still be legal in the next town over. Or they might observe that the next town over had offloaded its housing needs on them by banning apartments, so it was only fair that they do the same. It was all very rational, and contagious. And after a century of local rules upon local rules, the state's largest city looked like a muddled patchwork of zoning. The complexity of Portland's 779 distinct zoning categories, each one restrictive in its own ways and multiplied further across hundreds of other jurisdictions, has helped create a huge shortage of homes. That's especially true for the smaller and less expensive sorts of homes, since those are the ones most frequently banned by zoning. That housing shortage and the rising prices it drives have spiraled across city lines and ultimately left many thousands of people sleeping on couches, in parking lots, and in the woods. Starting in 2017 and with rising confidence in each year since, Oregon has been responding to this endless civic buck-passing by rethinking its 100-year-old decision to leave the details of zoning mostly up to local jurisdictions. Instead, much of the work on this statewide issue is now returning to the place it maybe should have always remained: the state. To see how far Oregon's consensus has moved, read a bill Governor Tina Kotek signed today. House Bill 2258 gives the state the power to override local zoning and allow any type of housing on standard urban lots. I'll read that last sentence again. The bill passed the state House 50-2, and the Senate 28-2. Kotek, its chief advocate, held a signing ceremony Monday for it and others. Aurora Dziadul, a legislative and policy analyst for the Oregon Department of Land Conservation and Development, said by email that her state agency plans to voluntarily apply "extra parameters" that narrow the scope of the program. But she said that yes, the bill does give the state the power to preemptively give zoning and building permit approval to any variety of housing project, from a backyard cottage to a skyscraper, on any lot that: allows housing of at least one type; falls within an urban growth boundary (a border that, in Oregon, defines the frontier between suburban and rural areas); is between 1,500 and 20,000 square feet has no more than a 15 percent slope; is outside areas officially designated as environmentally sensitive, naturally hazardous, containing significant natural resources, scenic, or open; and is vacant, including from a recent demolition as long as it results in more homes. A key phrase in the bill is in Section 4(2)a, which says that on such lots, the state may pre-approve only "attached or detached housing" - in other words, all housing. (That's one item in a list of qualifying factors that Dziadul said includes an implicit "or.") It's unlikely that the state will decide to use this power to legalize 4-story apartment buildings on every urban lot, for example. If it did, cities would have a strong incentive to look for ways to nullify the law - for example, with tight new regulations on demolition. Until any previous building on the site has been demolished, it wouldn't qualify for the de facto state zoning code created by HB 2258. Another issue: the staff...

You made it! The last contestant standing on an old-school game show. "Behind Door Number One" your charming host reveals, "a pile of rocks!" Behind Door Two, he grins, "a slightly larger pile of rocks!" And, gesturing to the last door with a glimmer of gold pouring out from beneath, "or will our lucky winner pick the million-dollar mystery prize?" It's a no-brainer. But as you reach for the knob, the host grabs your wrist. "What are you doing?" he hisses. "You're only allowed to pick between the first two doors!" Hardly seems fair, does it. But municipalities in British Columbia get the same treatment when it comes to their local governments. The province strong-arms cities, towns, villages, and districts into using bloc voting to elect their councils, a poor fit for representation in local elections. Ward (or "district") voting, the only current alternative, appears a bit more generous but has its own weighty problems: spoiled elections and two-party dominance. This year, as a special provincial committee studies election reform, might it finally come to pass that local governments get a glimpse behind that third door? Gold-standard elections, using the new best-in-class model now operational in Portland Oregon, are so close to being in reach: only a few lines of provincial law stand between municipal governments and better representation. British Columbia's standing election laws simply don't give local councils a fair shot at better elections. Bloc voting and ward voting - the only two choices municipalities are allowed - are hardly ideal for representing voters. Also known as plurality at-large voting, bloc voting is BC's default voting method for local councils. If 10 seats on the body are up for a bloc vote election, voters get to pick 10 candidates. The 10 winners are the ones with the most votes. The problem? In partisan contests, bloc voting often means the most popular party will win outsized representation on the council. Take the Vancouver City Council election of 1996 for example. The Non-Partisan Association (a center-right party, despite the name) won slightly more than 50 percent of the total vote, but took 100 percent of the seats. By contrast, if voters had the same preferences under a proportional model, the Non-Partisan Association likely would have wound up with half of the seats, roughly equal to their vote share. Other parties - including the Coalition of Progressive Electors, Vancouver Organized Independent Civic Electors, and others - would have split the remaining five seats, giving their communities a voice in local government. With turnout perpetually low in BC municipal elections, it's not out of the question that an extreme faction could seize control of most or all seats in a single election. As authors for Fair Vote Canada wrote in 2022, the winner-takes-all nature of council elections causes sudden and extreme policy swings, which can be expensive for taxpayers and create uncertainty for the individuals, communities, and businesses that local policies impact. BC offers local governments only one alternative to bloc voting, which might provide slightly more accurate representation on a council, but creates headaches of its own. Municipalities also have the option to elect councillors partially or entirely in districts, also known as wards. Wards that elect a single councillor operate under simple plurality rules (most-votes-wins), while multi-winner wards must use bloc voting. So far, only the District of Lake Country has adopted wards, but larger cities - including Burnaby, Surrey, and Vancouver - have debated or proposed converting to ward voting. While wards guarantee geographic areas will have representation on a council, they create concerns for fairness and representation. First off: if wards split neighborhoods or communities between districts, those communities might not win representation at all, so local governments must take precautions to draw maps impartially and fairly. (The ac...

Pop quiz: What do Bruce Harrell and Lorena Gonzalez have in common? Hint: It's something they also share with both Tammy Morales and Tanya Woo, as well as Ann Davison and Nichole Thomas-Kennedy, Cathy Moore and ChrisTiana ObeySumner, Dan Strauss and Heidi Wills, and many others besides. These candidates are mostly on opposite sides of Seattle's political spectrum. Each pair of competitors comprises one Seattle Times editorially endorsed candidate and one from the Stranger. So what's the common denominator? Democracy Vouchers. All these candidates (plus many more) took part in the city's innovative Democracy Voucher Program when they ran for office. Of the 42 eligible city candidates (for mayor, city council, or city attorney) who made it to the general election between 2017 and 2023, all but five used the program. Only two non-democracy voucher candidates have won office over those years, and they also don't share a lot of overlapping political space: Sara Nelson, the council's current pro-business, anti-tax president, and prior socialist firebrand councilmember Kshama Sawant. Both Nelson and Sawant have expressed support for the program though, and have offered varied reasons for not participating. (For Nelson, concerns about door-knocking during COVID and other logistics; for Sawant, that opposing corporate PAC funds would swamp what she'd be allowed to spend as a democracy voucher candidate. What does this mean for Seattle politics? Democracy vouchers are position-neutral, good for all kinds of candidates, and especially powerful for the voters of Seattle. Seattle voters have a chance to renew this popular, fruitful, and inexpensive program on the ballot this August. In the words of Council President Nelson: it's an "investment in democracy, the currency of your voice." Seattle's elections are nonpartisan, so they don't exhibit the same type of partisan polarization that threatens to overwhelm current state and US federal elections. But the city still has political sides - moderate vs. progressive, centrist vs. lefty, preservationist vs. YIMBY. Endorsements from the city's leading media outlets are a decent proxy for these lines of competition in Seattle politics. On one end is the Seattle Times, the city's moderate, largest news source. On the other side is the Stranger, Seattle's irreverent and unapologetically progressive alternative paper. The Seattle Times and the Stranger have only endorsed the same general election candidate in one city race since 2017 (plus one other contest where the Seattle Times didn't choose a candidate). Every other time, they've supported opposite sides of the local political options. Politicos might wonder then, whether a program like democracy vouchers benefits one side more than another. The answer? Nope! Those political distinctions melt away when examining who has benefited from democracy vouchers. Seattle Times-endorsed candidates have won using the program. Stranger-endorsed candidates have won using the program. And the two candidates who gained office without the program are from opposite political camps. What's more, vouchers fund a similar portion of candidates' campaigns, making up 32 to 88 percent of contributions to Seattle Times candidates and 35 to 88 percent of contributions to Stranger candidates. In 2023, all general election candidates used democracy vouchers. Mayor Bruce Harrell and councilmembers Rob Saka, Joy Hollingsworth, Maritza Rivera, Cathy Moore, and Bob Kettle all won with Seattle Times backing; Tammy Morales and Dan Strauss with a Stranger endorsement. In prior years the breakdown was inverted, and more Stranger-endorsed candidates have won; but they and their competitors have almost always also taken part in the voucher program. Even Ann Davison, who won election as Seattle's city attorney in 2021 while identifying as a Republican, used the program. Instead of advantaging one political group over another, the program has benefited a more important stakeholder...

There's a reason most experience the thrill of whitewater rafting with a seasoned guide. Rivers have forks, twists, and turns, and it helps to have someone along who can navigate them. In a tumultuous time for politics in the United States, leading election reform in a place like Juneau Alaska, can feel much the same: it's exhilarating to be out front leading a movement, but there are certain routes you must know -Not- to take - lest you find yourself stuck in a hole or plunging off a cliff. The Juneau Assembly recently shoved off on a quest to bring ranked choice voting to local elections. For one-winner races like picking a mayor or single assembly member, Juneau is sailing smoothly toward a tried-and-tested model that gives voters real choices and encourages candidates to work together. For Multi-winner contests, though, which include those for school board and the occasional two-person assembly race, the Assembly has steered toward a little-known variation: Cascade Voting, which can be as precipitous as its name implies. The Cascade method might look from a distance to be a shortcut to the ultimate destination: fairer, more representative elections. But Australians, Mainers, and Utahns have explored the same passage and capsized or hastily reversed course, a sign of treacherous waters ahead. Luckily for Juneau, a better route is just a few paddle strokes away: single transferable vote, also known as proportional ranked-choice-voting, offers a safe and charted path forward. Cascade voting (also known as "block preferential" or "multi-pass" voting) -looks- like ranked-choice-voting. It -sounds- like ranked choice voting. But instead of driving better governance and incentivizing more positive campaigns like ranked choice voting, the cascade method can distort election outcomes. Voters outside the mainstream can find their voices locked out of governing entirely. And in some cases, even candidates with majority support can lose their seats. On the surface, Cascade voting appears to be little more than a version of ranked choice voting that elects multiple candidates (like three people to fill open seats on a local school board) rather than just one (like a legislator or mayor). Just as in a regular ranked contest, voters select candidates in order of preference. Once votes are in, officials eliminate the worst performers and transfer their votes to voters' next choices until someone wins a majority. But it's after the first winner that the cascade model veers off course. To determine the winner of the second seat, election administrators count -all- the ballots again, ignoring rankings for the winner. Simply put, so long as they ranked their ballots, voters who elected the first-round winner get just as much weight in choosing the runner-up. The process repeats until there are enough winners to fill all of the seats up for election on the body in question. While it may seem like a simple procedural tweak to accommodate multi-winner contests, Cascade voting can have disastrous consequences for representation. Since the same voters get to elect multiple candidates, votes tend to "trickle -up" to candidates who are most like the initial winner. Take Australia, for example, which once used the Cascade model for its senate. It almost always produced single-party delegation sweeps, over-representing the most popular party with no representation for anyone else. At the local level, things got even worse. In Australian cities, minority parties figured out how to manipulate the process and prevent those in the majority from winning at all. It's no wonder, then, that one contemporary reformer called it a "blockhead system." In 1948, the country phased out Cascade voting. Closer to home, few, if any, would recommend following the Cascade route. For example, in Utah, the city councils of both Payson and Vineyard opted out of cascade voting in 2025 after adopting it on a trial basis six years earlier. And while Portland Maine, used the...

With a miniscule portion of the city's budget, democracy vouchers deliver a whopping impact. The program's funding is up for renewal this August, and it's a great deal. The renewal budget, $4.5 million per year in property taxes, is just 0.053 percent of the city's $8.5 billion 2025 budget. Renewal is an even smaller proportion of the budget than the original 2015 levy (which you also needed a magnifying glass to see). That's a pretty amazing price for the program's benefits. I've already covered how democracy vouchers: empower tens of thousands more residents to support local candidates they believe in; cultivate a more representative donor pool; reduce the flow of out-of-state and big-dollar donations; and encourage more diverse candidates to run, connect with voters, and win office. It's delivering real bang for the buck. The democracy voucher renewal cost can still be referred to as "budget dust," as was the original 2015 levy. What's more, that miniscule proportion of the total budget will continue to shrink as the city's budget grows (which it's done every year) and the levy rate stays constant. Over the course of its first nine years, the $3 million democracy voucher levy compressed from an already-tiny 0.059 percent of the 2016 city budget to 0.038 percent in 2024. The Democracy Voucher Program is at least as worthwhile as many other similarly priced items in the city's 2025 budget. Among them are: three months of public golf course maintenance and programs; half of the annual funds for technology investments in construction and inspections; fewer than three weeks of park maintenance; eight weeks of debt service payments; and four months of benefits management for retired employees. What does the levy mean for individual property owners? The tax rate in the proposition is $2.27 per $1,000 of assessed value in the first year, representing an additional tax rate of $0.015 per $1,000 from the existing funding rate. That comes to about $13.07 per year for a median-priced house, according to the SEEC - about a $4 per year increase, or even less when accounting for inflation. In other words, for an annual household cost less than the price of a single movie ticket, Seattleites can continue to reshape a fundamental part of their democracy. In 2015, the Honest Elections campaign set the program funding levy at $3 million per year. That turned out to be a pretty good estimate of what it would take to launch and run democracy vouchers for Seattle, and it's kept the program solvent for its first ten years. Spending fluctuates year to year, of course (Seattle's elections are in odd-numbered years, so that's when the bulk of the costs come through), and unused funds from one year roll over to support costs in the next. Administrators at the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission (SEEC), the entity that runs the program, estimated what it will take to fund another decade of democracy vouchers and determined that the program needs a slight increase from the past rate to keep going. With years of data behind them, they could better guess how to account for differing numbers of candidates and residents using the program. It's true that a lot of Seattleites still don't use their vouchers, letting them languish on a forgotten shelf. But neither the original program designers (including Sightline) nor the SEEC expect 100 percent of Seattle residents to hand in vouchers; total participation is neither the program's success metric nor the budgeting baseline. They know that campaign finance reform is a tough nut to crack, and there will always be people who don't engage politically in that way. Still, the current level of voucher dollars flowing in is impressive - enough to fund the bulk of participating candidates' campaigns and place Seattle as having one of the top, if not the highest, contributor rates of all US cities. What's more, most city candidates have opted into the program, just as the architects of the program hoped...