Third parties writing new ticket

So you’ve decided your state Legislator is a bum and you’re going to do something about it by running for office, eh? If you don’t have a wad of cash lying around, good luck.

If you can’t cough up hundreds of dollars to pay a candidate-filing fee, you do have the option of trying to collect signatures, says Linde Knighton, co-chair of Washington’s Progressive Party. But the process is a labyrinth that she and a coalition of the state’s third parties – including the American Heritage Party, the Constitution Party, the Freedom Socialists, and the Libertarians – are working to change in a bill they’re writing for next year’s Legislature.

Under current election law, Knighton says, independent and third-party candidates have to place a notice in a daily newspaper advertising a specific date, time and place at which they will collect signatures. Never mind if the candidates’ own parties nominated them – the state requires a faux nominating convention at which 100 valid signatures must be collected for county and legislative seats or 1,000 for higher offices – all in one place, at one time, on the correct form, in black ink, with no hash marks or illegible names.

That means having to collect double the number needed just to pass muster, she says.

It’s a ridiculous system that Knighton says Democrats and Republicans cooked up to keep competition off the ballot. To fix that, the third parties are currently drafting legislation that they plan to float before lawmakers starting in September. The bill would allow their own nominating conventions to be recognized and allow unaffiliated candidates to have more time to get the signatures – two weeks for local offices and three months for statewide bids.

The coalition expects resistance from the major parties, who, Knighton says, typically argue that voting for a third-party candidate is a waste. She disagrees. “If enough of you vote for your favorite third party, then they’ll win,” Knighton says.

But, first, they have to get on the ballot – something that the state House’s Government and Tribal Affairs Committee has invited coalition members to tell them about in a hearing scheduled for July 23 in Olympia.

More voices at Yesler Terrace

A funny thing happened on the way to holding separate meetings for Yesler Terrace residents who are worried about the housing complex’s future redevelopment: They got a voice, just not their own.

At the June 27 meeting of the Yesler Terrace Citizens Review Committee, which is working on broad concepts for how the Seattle Housing Authority’s 30 acres of low-income housing will be rebuilt on First Hill, a consultant who has met with tenants stepped up to tell the committee that it needs to have more residents on it – specifically people of color from each language group at Yesler Terrace.

That’s exactly what residents and housing activists were advocating last year during the formation of the committee, which includes three residents out of 20 members. The committee is currently crafting guiding principles that will allow the housing authority to rebuild Yesler Terrace as a mixed-income community with market-rate housing – something a few residents have questioned loudly at past committee meetings.

In April, the committee’s chair, former Seattle Mayor Norm Rice, decided to set up separate resident meetings, with the housing authority hiring facilitators Mayet Dalila and Marcia Tate Arunga to gather input at two meetings held in June.

As Dalila told the committee on June 27, their report includes six unsolicited recommendations aimed at reducing what they call widespread tenant mistrust of the committee and the housing authority. Among the suggestions, the housing authority needs to do a better job of distributing meeting notices and information, and take intercultural communications training to reduce conflict with African Americans, Hispanics, Somalis, Vietnamese and other groups who live at Yesler Terrace.

Dalila also said the committee itself should have representatives from each language group at the table so they can report back to their communities, rather than relying solely on interpreters at meetings, as the committee does now. “The community by and large would feel more at ease if they had more participation,” Dalila said.

After the meeting, Rice said that it wasn’t up to him – he’d have to ask the housing authority’s board of commissioners before adding any members. “We are a creature of the commission,” he said. “I don’t assume to take authority from them.”

—Cydney Gillis