(tense uptempo music) - Welcome to "Crosscut Now", I'm Paris Jackson.

In today's episode, democracy is the cornerstone of American politics.

In recent years, it's been in jeopardy across the nation.

An independent, nonpartisan think tank's recent survey suggests a way more Washington voters would engage in their civic duty.

We'll explain how so coming up.

I sat down with Sightline Institute's founder and Executive Director Alan Durning to understand why he says all Washington cities suffer low voter turnout during odd-numbered election years due to a decades-old state law.

(light music) Welcome, Alan.

Thank you for joining us today.

- Oh, it's my pleasure to be here.

- There's a 60-year-old law in the books that require cities and local districts to hold elections during odd-numbered years.

that's not tied to presidential or congressional elections.

Why is that?

- Yeah, Washington passed this law in 1963 requiring all municipalities in the state and school districts and so on to hold their elections in November of odd-numbered years to keep them away from even-numbered years.

There's a long history that goes back years and years before that in Washington, as in many other states, where this reform was intended to suppress the vote among poor people and people of color, and people of less education.

And also in other states, not in Washington, it was motivated by a desire to break up the political machines that controlled cities.

So it was this big movement a hundred and something years ago that we're still even with the residue of it today, and it's having an effect of suppressing turnout in our cities all across Washington state.

- And with that, your research finds at your institute, Sightline Institute, that it negatively affects voter turnout.

How so?

- Yeah, we've studied every municipality in the state of Washington, every city in town, at least of mid or large size.

And in every single case, we have less turnout in the local elections than we have in the state and national elections.

The odd-numbered years when we vote on city races, we get far fewer people participating than in the even-numbered years.

In every single city we find this.

In statewide, it's about 580,000 fewer people voted in the 2021 cycle in municipalities than voted in the 2022 statewide and national elections.

Because people are drawn to come to the polls when the big national races are going on, and they stay to vote for everything else that's on the ballot, including county elections and so on and so forth.

But there's just less of a draw for people to participate in local elections.

- And your researchers specifically looked at the 2021 local elections versus the 2022 midterm elections, and you found some interesting things with regards to different cities and how turnout looked.

Kinda give us a breakdown on what you saw maybe in Tacoma or Seattle.

- [Alan] Yeah, in Seattle it was a 20% penalty in terms of reduced voter participation in local elections.

In Tacoma, it was 39%.

In Spokane it was 43%.

And across the state it was an average of almost 40% of a reduction, a penalty in turnout that results from this state law that requires cities to hold their elections in odd-numbered years and doesn't allow them to hold them at the time when everyone wants to vote anyway.

- And what's fascinating, just as you mentioned, you classify it as a turnout penalty during those odd-numbered years, and a turnout bonus during those even-number years.

And in other words, you're getting that bonus when it's connected, as you mentioned, to the presidential election.

- It's a penalty to our democracy if we do something that reduces voter participation In our country in recent years, there's been a huge fight over all the policies that are aimed to increase or to suppress voter participation.

This is a giant issue in national debates, right?

- [Paris] Right.

- [Alan] Here in Washington, we've exemplified a number of model policies for increasing voter participation.

We do vote by mail.

We automatically register people to vote.

We've done all these things.

And the one thing we haven't done is move our local elections to the time when people are voting anyway.

And that one reform would swamp all the others in terms of the increase in participation.

This isn't a novel idea, right?

There are cities across the United States and other states that have moved their elections to be consolidated at the time of midterm and presidential elections.

And they're getting huge increases in participation, sometimes twice the participation.

- And let's break that down.

When we talk about whether it's party lines, whether it's racial makeup, or whether it's the size of a city you are seeing from your research, that doesn't even matter because voter turnout during those even years is higher.

- [Alan] It's really interesting.

Maybe this is a reason why the issue is not more prominent in our debate because it's a reform that doesn't seem to help either side.

It doesn't help conservatives or liberals across the board.

When we studied all the different legislative districts in different cities across the state of Washington, and we looked at the difference in their participation in odd-numbered years and even-numbered years, we can't really find any correlation with any of the obvious candidates that you would look for with race or ethnicity, with the size of the city, how rural or urban it is, with the party affiliation of the elected officials there.

So it's something that would dramatically improve participation, but not obviously benefit one team or the other.

And so I think it's a no-brainer.

Also, it saves money.

- And one thing that you guys also argue, it's going to help democracy because more votes will be counted.

- Letting our cities move their elections from odd-numbered years to even-numbered years gives them a huge boost in how much participation they will get.

We've seen in cities across the U.S. that have moved their elections, they're seeing a big increase.

50% increase, 80% increase, 120% increase in the voter participation.

And the result of that is you have a much healthier democracy where the people who are getting elected have a mandate to govern because they've got not just some poultry low turnout, but a big turnout.

In Washington state right now, we have this bizarre situation where our state officials are elected by an electorate that's, in some districts, twice as large as the city officials from the same district.

And all because of a state law that requires municipalities to hold their elections in odd-numbered years.

All we have to do as California, as Arizona, as Nevada have done is to let cities switch.

Don't require it, just let them switch to even-numbered years.

- Are there defenders of this current law that want to keep elections tied to odd-number years?

- Political campaign professionals love to have lots of different elections 'cause it's job security for them.

And incumbents in some cities kind of like having a small electorate.

They know how to win with a smaller electorate.

So some local officials may oppose it, but overall, the public supports it.

The challenge with this issue is there's no obvious political winner.

And so there's not a big constituency to drive the change.

There's no giant interest group that's out there just trying to improve our democracy by getting more people to vote.

And if it doesn't help your party, your team, then no one shows up.

- It was a pleasure speaking with you, Alan.

- And for me as well.

- If you would like to find out where your city falls in line with Sightline's recent Voter Turnout report, just go to sightline.org.

(light bouncy music) I'm Paris Jackson.

Thank you for watching "Crosscut Now", your destination for nonprofit Northwest news.

Go to crosscut.com for more.

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