S. S. Trudeau

Why I Do Not Support the Ann Arbor "Fair Election" Proposals

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If you've been out and about town this summer, you may have encountered petitioners circulating two petitions to change how Ann Arbor elects our City Council and Mayor. Each initiative, if enacted, would have significant downsides while failing to significantly address the (often imagined) problems it attempts to solve.

One petition seeks to make the elections non-partisan (with no primary election and no party identifier on the ballot). The other requires the City to generously match campaign donations with general fund dollars for City Council and Mayoral candidates. The stated goals of these petitions are to increase voter participation and reduce the influence of money on City Council and Mayor elections. They would instead make these elections even more dependent on money to win, increase the odds that candidates with only a small minority of support win seats, reduce democratic participation, and cause the City to redirect a sizable portion of our general fund to finance often unserious candidates. If you care about fair and representative local democracy, you should not support these efforts.

Non-partisan Elections Proposal #

This proposal's biggest flaw is eliminating a primary election. Without a primary election, the November ballot will likely have a long list of candidates for each seat. This guarantees many races will be won by candidates without a majority and makes it possible for a candidate to win with a small minority of the total vote. Other cities in Michigan, like Lansing that have non-partisan elections run a "top 2" non-partisan primary to avoid this situation. This proposal chose not to follow this model.

Petitioners argue that more voters are likely to participate by moving the main election to November (instead of the August primary, which currently decides the election). More people vote in November than in August. However, voter participation drops off significantly on the non-partisan section of the ballot, so it is not a guarantee more voters will vote in these races. With a wide ballot, the winner could easily secure their seat with the same number (or even fewer) votes than required to win a primary.

Ann Arbor has already approved ranked-choice voting (RCV), which could mitigate the 'no primary' problem. However, the State currently does not allow municipalities to use this system, and there's no indication that this will change anytime soon. The proposal could have conditioned this change on RCV approval, but it did not. It could also have preserved a primary election until RCV was a viable option, but also missed this opportunity.

One of the potential consequences of the non-partisan elections proposal is the increased value of endorsements from partisan organizations like the Washtenaw County Democrats. With no primary, these endorsements, decided by a much smaller group of people than those who might vote in the primary, could become a significant factor in the elections. This could shift the focus from candidates who appeal to a broad range of voters to those who cater to party insiders, undermining the democratic nature of our elections.

November general elections are much noisier than the August primary season. With more political activity to compete with and a longer list of candidates on the ballot in November, using money to reach voters in mass will be more costly. This will increase the importance of raising significant sums for mailers, social media advertisements, text messages, and other mass messaging tools. It will strengthen the value of money in these elections and reduce the impact of old-fashioned, door-knocking campaigns.

Petitioners argue that Ann Arbor votes so strongly Democratic that party signifiers are irrelevant. However, it was only a few years ago that a former Republican won an election as an “Independent,” and a nominally Democratic candidate appealed to local Republicans to vote in the Democratic Party primary to undermine the choice of Democratic voters. Party labels are still useful and valuable to many voters.

This proposal intended to increase voter participation in the election does no such thing while reducing democratic input into candidate selection, removing relevant information to voters from the ballot, and increasing the costs to win a seat by making campaigning more expensive.

Public Funding Proposal

The second petition proposes the City match campaign donations to candidates using general fund dollars up to a ratio of nine City dollars to every dollar raised and a limit of $40,000 for each Council candidate and $90,000 for each candidate for Mayor.

The problems with this proposal are myriad. It is an unfunded mandate with an unbounded cost financed with City general fund dollars while generously funding unserious candidates. It also exacerbates the “no primary” problem of the nonpartisan proposal by encouraging an even longer list of candidates in a single November election.

The proposal includes no funding mechanism other than directing the City to establish a fund and provide campaign donation matches. There are no upper limits on how many candidates can run, so there is no upper bound on the cost to the City. Because no new funding source has been identified, every dollar we spend on campaign matches is a dollar the City must take away from other City services.

We can look to Denver to see how a similar system has played out. They spent nearly $7.7 million on their “fair election fund,” with millions of funding candidates with no chance to win. This doesn’t count the cost of staff to administer and manage the program, which is already under strain.

There is no language in this proposal to limit how these campaign dollars are spent. Once campaigns receive matching donations from City taxpayers, they will only be subject to standard campaign finance rules. These rules allow campaigns to donate to other campaigns or, if a campaign committee is dissolved, to donate unused funds to a nonprofit. This would allow candidates to essentially “launder” money from Ann Arbor taxpayers into other campaigns, ballot initiatives, or PACs, including for races outside the City.

The generosity of the nine-times match and lack of limits in this proposal also creates the potential for a type of fraud we simply don’t have the capacity to police. Small cartels of mutual donors and candidates could easily set up systems to “donate” to each other, extract City matching funds ($450 of City funds for every $50 “donated”), and spend those dollars nominally on “campaign services” provided by that same network of candidates and donors. Uncovering and prosecuting this kind of fraud would be difficult and expensive, in addition to the high costs of funding and administering this system.

There is no qualification mechanism for candidates other than filing to run for office and collecting campaign donations. This means city taxpayers will be funding candidates that many residents find particularly offensive (for example, one such perennial candidate).

Petition circulators argue that Ann Arbor elections have become a battle for who raises the most money, and winning candidates are generously funded by “out of town” donors or “special interests.” In almost every case, the “out of town” donors are the friends and family of a candidate. Is it a scandal when a candidate raises $50 from a college roommate in Chicago or $100 from their parents in Florida? The most significant PACs from which City Council candidates receive donations are connected to labor unions, and even those are not sizable relative to the many small donations from individuals that make up the majority of every candidate’s campaign fund. They also ignore the many examples of local elections where candidates have outspent opponents by multiples yet still lost. Especially in local elections, popularity and hitting the doors matter! Money can help, but there is no compelling case that the problem is so large that creating an expensive problematic system is worth all the risks and costs.

What’s Really Going on Here?

In recent years, donations to local Council and Mayor campaigns have increased. This can entirely be attributed to formerly inattentive voters and donors recognizing the problems previous City Council members created while in office with their outlandish behavior and ineffectual governance. Voters sought out a better set of candidates to support with their volunteered time and donated dollars. These former office-holders, facing a newly activated electorate, have realized they can’t win seats under the current rules, so they’re trying to change the rules. Their ideas aren’t popular with a majority of voters, but if each ballot has a long list of undifferentiated candidates, they don’t need to win a majority of voters. They can win with a minority. And with a very generous public financing system, they also can compete in the much more expensive, media-centric November election the non-partisan proposal creates.

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