Campaign Money Madness

Contributions and expenditures skyrocket in local campaigns, but Lenora Jones only spends 11 cents per vote.
By Doug Collins, The Free Press

A report published by the Seattle Ethics and Elections Commission outlines campaign money amounts and trends for candidates and ballot issues in the 1999 primary and general elections. Among the findings:

• For the first time, the total amount of contributions raised and expenditures made by city council campaigns surpassed one million dollars. The total amounts for 1999 were $1,085,991 raised and $1,026,456 spent. Compare that to 1995, in which there was only $718,444 raised and $753,896 spent.

• There is an increasing reliance for city council races on large contributions as a source of campaign funding. The average contribution size jumped from $88 in 1995 to over $105 in 1999, far in excess of inflation. At the same time, the number of contributors decreased. In 1995 there were 10,183 contributors, while in 1999 there were only 8,884.

The study also compared election campaign money over a period of decades and concluded that Seattle's partial public financing of elections in the 1970s and 80s resulted in both "broader participation in political campaigns" in those years as measured by number of contributors, and more reliance on small contributions. Such public funding of elections was made illegal by a statewide ballot initiative a decade ago.

*Under the Seattle public funding system, candidates who agreed to cap their expenditures could receive matching funds of up to $50 for each individual contribution, which encouraged candidates to solicit more smaller-sized contributions.

By dividing total campaign expenditures from the Ethics report by the number of votes that candidates received in the final 1999 elections, we can see how many dollars each candidate spent to receive a single vote, or "dollars per vote." Winners receive an asterisk.

Heidi Wills's dollars-per-vote rating was way worse than anyone else's -- she had to spend nearly two dollars for each vote she got, twice as much as opponent Charlie Chong had to spend. The Position 9 race between Mason and Compton was also pretty expensive for both candidates (Compton put a whopping $45,084 of his own money into his campaign chest).

The winner of the dollars-per-vote contest was Lenora Jones, who spent only 11 cents for each vote she got, though her opponent Steinbrueck received second-place honors at 41 cents. Progressive Curt Firestone's dollars-per-vote performance was unfortunately not stellar, at a fairly expensive $1.26 per vote.

*In three out of five cases, the candidate who spent more dollars per vote was a winner. In four out of five cases, the candidate who spent more total money was the winner (the only winner who could buck both trends was tenant advocate Judy Nicastro).

*So our advice for anyone who wants to win a future city council election is "start making rich friends now."