Critics of Seattle's democracy vouchers often point to one trend as evidence of the program's fallibility: a rise in local "independent expenditures." That is, dark money campaign funding vehicles like super PACs. Despite their upsides, critics say, vouchers have simply pushed millions of big-donor dollars from official campaigns into less transparent and accountable forms, rendering the program a waste of money.
Sightline led the design of the Democracy Voucher Program and has promoted and studied it for more than a decade. So, I wanted to check this accusation - and found it unwarranted.
Independent expenditures are up in many cities across the United States, democracy vouchers or not. And preliminary academic analysis controlling for other factors confirms the program has had no effect on this kind of outside spending.
Instead, Seattle's experience shows that this innovative public financing model is delivering on its promise of more people-powered elections - even if US laws hamstring the city's options for addressing every dark money dollar.
From the inception of the program, opponents raised fears of spending from outside groups - special interests not affiliated with official campaigns. The 2015 opposition statement against I-122 (the ballot initiative that created the program), for example, suggested that it, quote: "pushes more money into less accountable independent expenditures, which I-122 does nothing to limit or reform," end-quote. Recent news articles continue to reference the explosion of independent expenditures as the flip side of an otherwise markedly successful endeavor.
It's true that the city (and its voucher program) cannot limit this type of spending, although it can and has taken some steps to curtail or highlight certain offenders, such as banning foreign-influenced corporations from political spending and strengthening transparency and disclosure laws. Independent expenditures are dollars from interest groups that are explicitly prohibited from coordinating with candidate campaigns (hence the "independent" moniker). These entities can be political action committees (PACs), super PACs, or other "dark money" groups, which all have unlimited spending but different allowances on the funding they can accept.
The US Supreme Court prohibited limitations on such spending as far back as Buckley v. Valeo in 1976. It then kicked the door wide open for corporate spending in Citizens United v. FEC in 2010, giving wealthy individuals and groups carte blanche to sway elections. And research shows that these funds do influence at least some policies.
It's also true that independent expenditures have risen in Seattle in recent years. But that doesn't mean they've grown because of the voucher program.
To test the allegation that the voucher program pushed political dollars out of official campaigns and into the "dark money" arena, Sightline turned to the leading independent US scholar of the program, Professor Jennifer Heerwig of SUNY-Stony Brook. Her research casts doubt on the claim, showing that independent expenditures have increased in many cities in recent years - some much more dramatically than in Seattle.
Independent expenditures, increasingly from ideological super PACs, have exploded in US politics over the past decade, including infiltrating local elections in the years directly following the 2010 Citizens United decision. Contributions to super PACs grew more than 30-fold from $40.1 million in 2012 to $1.3 billion in 2024, according to one report. According to another, spending doubled from 2020 to 2024 alone. Notably, these dollars are difficult to track, and reported figures likely under-estimate the growth.
Seattle and other nearby cities are not immune to this trend, nor is Seattle uniquely vulnerable to these outside campaigns. To study whether Seattle's independent expenditures increase bore any connection with the city's democracy vouchers, Professor Heerwig and researcher Anna Campbell collecte...

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