Under a proposal moving through the state House, candidates and campaigns would no longer be required to file reports with city elections departments like Seattle’s Ethics and Elections Commission. Instead, candidates would only have to file with the Public Disclosure Commission, a state agency that oversees every election in the state.
The SEEC, unlike the PDC, has a reputation for proactively pursuing and penalizing candidates who violate city elections rules. If candidates are no longer required to file with the SEEC, commission director Wayne Barnett says, the commission could lose its ability to enforce contribution limits and campaign-disclosure requirements, including the requirement that candidates report the employer and occupation of every contributor.
The proposal “says that filings with the state are legally sufficient. So let’s say we have someone running for city council who isn’t filing occupation and employer,” Barnett says. Under the proposed legislation, “they could say, ‘Sorry, according to this law, my filing with the state is sufficient. That’s my concern.”
The bill, sponsored by Sen. Darlene Fairley (D-32), was initially what Barnett calls an “innocuous streamlining effort” that would have merely eliminated a requirement that candidates file reports with both county auditors and the PDC. However, the provision taking away the elections commission’s authority was later added at the request of the Associated General Contractors of Washington, which was linked to Working For Seattle, a PAC that was funded primarily by the Seattle firefighters union. Last year, the SEEC imposed a $5,000 fine on Working for Seattle when it failed to report spending more than $100,000 in support of mayoral candidate Joe Mallahan. The legislation would also have a major impact on people seeking information on local elections, who would have to wade through the PDC’s web site to get information on a candidate’s campaign finance records. That web site is notoriously slow, buggy, and difficult to use. In contrast, Ethics and Elections’ web site includes only Seattle records, is updated frequently, and is (editorializing here, as someone who uses both sites frequently) mercifully easy to use.
“Right now, if you or anyone else in Seattle wants to find the last 20 reports filed in city races, you go to our site and they’re all there,” Barnett says. “To me, the impact on our agency’s enforcement authority is secondary to the imapct on the public. This isn’t a knock on the PDC—it’s just that our site is not devoted to every race in the state, from the governor to county sheriffs.”
The city’s lobbyists are seeking to convince legislators to strip out the provision, which Office of Intergovernmental Relations director Marco Lowe says they probably considered innocuous. “I really believe the intent of this bill was to simplify things,” Lowe says. “It takes a very thorough reading to see what it would do to the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission.”
