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Kshama Sawant recall, Seattle, Washington (2020-2021)
| Seattle City Council recall |
|---|
 |
| Officeholders |
| Recall status |
| Recall election date |
| December 7, 2021 |
| See also |
| Recall overview Political recall efforts, 2021 Recalls in Washington Washington recall laws City council recalls Recall reports |
A recall election for District 3 City Councilmember Kshama Sawant took place on December 7, 2021, in Seattle, Washington.[1] Sawant defeated the recall attempt. The election results were certified on December 17.[2]
Recall petitioners alleged four grounds for recall against Sawant: relinquishing the authority of her office, misusing city funds for electioneering purposes, disregarding regulations related to COVID-19, and misusing her official position.[3] Sawant responded to the allegations in an opposition filing with the superior court, arguing the recall effort was politically motivated and asking the court to dismiss the petition because it failed to meet the burden of factual and legal sufficiency.[4] Click here to read details about the recall grounds. Click here to read Sawant's court filing. A sample ballot with the recall question wording and Sawant's official response can be found here.
Though the office of city council is officially nonpartisan, Sawant is a member of the Socialist Alternative Party and upon her election in 2013 was the first socialist elected to Seattle city government in 97 years.[5]
On October 2, 2020, Sawant appealed the superior court's certification of the recall to the Washington Supreme Court.[4] On April 1, 2021, the Washington Supreme Court ruled that the recall could proceed on all of the alleged grounds except for the allegation that Sawant relinquished the authority of her office to a political agency.[6][7] Recall organizers submitted signatures on September 8, 2021, ahead of the October 19 deadline.[8][9]
The recall was more likely to appear on the November 2, 2021, ballot if the required 10,739 valid signatures had been submitted by early August. The Recall Sawant campaign announced it had collected around 9,000 signatures as of early July. Sawant announced her supporters would help gather signatures in an effort to put the recall on the November ballot. See more below.
Only voters within District 3 could vote in the recall election. If Sawant had been recalled, council members would have appointed a replacement and a special election would have been held in 2022.[10][11][12]
According to The Seattle Times, this was the first city council recall to make the ballot in Seattle's history.[12]
As of November, this was one of 12 city council recall efforts Ballotpedia had tracked in the 100 largest cities in 2021. Six of those efforts were in four California cities (Los Angeles, Riverside, Anaheim, and San Diego). Three were in Anchorage, Alaska. The other two were in Kansas City, Mo., and Austin, Texas.
As of this election, Ballotpedia had tracked 324 recall efforts against 491 officials in 2021. City council recalls made up around 25% of that total, with 80 efforts targeting 140 city council members.
Recall vote
Kshama Sawant recall, 2021
Kshama Sawant won the Seattle City Council District 3 recall election on December 7, 2021.
Recall Vote |
% |
Votes |
|||
Yes |
49.6
|
20,346 | |||
| ✔ | No |
50.4
|
20,656 | ||
Total Votes |
41,002 | ||||
|
|
Results updates by day
King County Elections published the following results updates ahead of the December 17 certification date. See reported vote totals and percentages by day below.[13]
Dec. 16
Yes: 20,340 - 49.6%
No: 20,646 - 50.4%
Dec. 15
Yes: 20,312 - 49.6%
No: 20,629 - 50.4%
Dec. 14
Yes: 20,296 - 49.6%
No: 20,605 - 50.4%
Dec. 13
Yes: 20,281 - 49.6%
No: 20,590 - 50.4%
Dec. 10
Yes: 20,218 - 49.7%
No: 20,467 - 50.3%
Dec. 8
Yes: 19,733 - 50.3%
No: 19,487 - 49.7%
Dec. 7
Yes: 17,048 - 53.1%
No: 15,055 - 46.9%
Sample ballot
The following sample ballot from King County Elections contains the recall question and Sawant's official response.[14]
Election history
Sawant was first elected to the council as an at-large member in 2013, when she defeated four-term Democratic incumbent Richard Conlin 50.9% to 49.1%. When the council transitioned to district-based voting at the 2015 election, Sawant was re-elected to the council as the member for District 3. Sawant was re-elected in 2019, defeating challenger Egan Orion 51.8% to 47.7%. A total of 42,956 votes were cast in the 2019 District 3 election, with Sawant receiving 22,263 votes, Orion receiving 20,488, and the remainder being cast for write-in candidates.
Candidate Connection survey (2019)
Kshama Sawant completed Ballotpedia's Candidate Connection survey in 2019. The survey questions appear in bold and are followed by Sawant's responses. Candidates are asked three required questions for this survey, but they may answer additional optional questions as well.
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2) Seattle should lead nationally on the Green New Deal, becoming 100% renewable by 2030. Tax the rich to expand mass transit, making it free and electric. Create thousands of good union jobs expanding wind and solar, and retrofitting buildings to the highest efficiency standards.
This year’s city elections will be a referendum on who runs Seattle - Amazon and big business or working people. That is why Seattle's biggest businesses have amassed over $1 million so far in corporate PACs ($200,000 from Amazon alone), and are disproportionately focusing that money on our election in Seattle’s District 3. Meanwhile, our campaign is “not for sale” - entirely funded by donations from working people, and as always doesn’t accept a dime in corporate cash. I only take the average wage ($40,000) of District 3 residents and donate the rest of my six-figure City Council salary to social justice movements.
The single biggest challenge for District 3, and for Seattle as a whole, is the acute affordable housing and homelessness crisis. At this point, a majority of working people are being adversely affected, and people of color and the LGBTQ community are dispropotionately impacted. Tens of thousands of renters are extremely rent-burdened (paying more than half their income on rent), and therefore, are vulnerable to being made homeless. We also have chronic underfunding of homeless services, mental health services, youth jobs, public education.
The last decade shows the for-profit housing market has failed us. Seattle has had the nation’s largest number of construction cranes four years running, yet the crisis of affordable housing remains among the worst in the country, with the average one-bedroom rent now over two thousand dollars a month.
Studies show that when the average rent in a metropolitan area increases by $100, homelessness increases by at least 15%, often higher. We need universal rent control to stop Seattle’s skyrocketing rents and hemorrhaging of affordable housing.
We also need a massive expansion of social housing - publicly-owned, high quality, permanently affordable housing. I was a proud fighter for the Amazon Tax in Seattle, and opposed its shameful repeal when Mayor Durkan and seven of the nine councilmembers capitulated to Amazon and big business, and reversed this progressive tax less than a month after it was unanimously passed.
Note: Ballotpedia reserves the right to edit Candidate Connection survey responses. Any edits made by Ballotpedia will be clearly marked with [brackets] for the public. If the candidate disagrees with an edit, he or she may request the full removal of the survey response from Ballotpedia.org. Ballotpedia does not edit or correct typographical errors unless the candidate's campaign requests it.
Recall supporters
Seattle resident Ernest "Ernie" Lou filed the recall petition alleging six specific grounds for recall. Before the judicial hearing on the petition, Lou dropped the fourth and sixth charges and Judge Jim Rogers dismissed them in his order allowing the other four charges to proceed.
The four charges that Judge Rogers certified against Sawant were:
- relinquishing the authority of her office to an outside political organization
- misusing city funds for electioneering purposes
- disregarding regulations related to COVID-19 by allowing people into city hall when it was closed to the public
- misusing her official position by leading a protest march to Mayor Jenny Durkan's private residence, the location of which is protected under state confidentiality laws.[3]
Scroll down to read the full recall petition text.
Recall petition
Recall opponents
On September 11, 2020, Sawant filed an opposition to the recall petition with the court. After superior court Judge Jim Rogers found four of the six charges legally sufficient to proceed, Sawant filed an appeal with the Washington Supreme Court.[4]
Scroll down to read Sawant's full opposition filing.
Sawant opposition filing
Debates
November 10, 2021
Seattle Channel's City Inside/Out hosted a debate between Sawant and recall campaign manager Henry Bridger.
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Campaign finance
Campaigns registered for and against the recall reported the following contribution totals.
Path to the ballot
- See also: Laws governing recall in Washington
In order for a public official to be recalled, Article I, §33 of the Washington Constitution requires a showing that the official engaged in the "commission of some act or acts of malfeasance or misfeasance while in office, or who has violated his oath of office." If a judicial review of the recall petition finds legally sufficient grounds for recall, the petition enters the signature-gathering phase.
The recall against Sawant was initiated on August 18, 2020, when petitioner Ernie Lou submitted a formal recall petition to the King County Elections Office.[15] On September 16, King County Superior Court Judge Jim Rogers ruled the recall against Sawant could proceed and allowed four of the six grounds in the petition to move forward.[3] Sawant appealed the decision to the Washington Supreme Court on October 2 and the court scheduled the appeal to begin on November 23.[16] The supreme court was expected to consider the case without oral arguments during its January 7, 2021, conference, but announced on January 8, 2021, that it was delaying its decision in the case.[17][18]
On April 1, 2021, the Washington Supreme Court ruled that the recall could proceed, allowing organizers to gather signatures.[7] To get the recall on the ballot, petitioners had to gather more than 10,700 signatures from registered voters, which is equal to 25% of the total votes cast in the last District 3 election held in 2019.[15] The signature filing deadline was October 19, 2021.[9] Organizers submitted signatures on September 8.[8][16]
On September 30, King County Elections announced that it had found more than 11,000 signatures valid and scheduled the recall vote for December 7, 2021.[1]
Sawant supporters gather signatures
The recall was more likely to appear on the November 2, 2021, ballot instead of a later ballot if the required 10,739 valid signatures had been submitted by early August. The Recall Sawant campaign announced it had collected around 9,000 signatures as of early July.
Sawant announced her supporters would help gather signatures in an effort to put the recall on the November ballot. Sawant said, "They want to win a special election because they don’t want ordinary working people to vote. They know Black people, working-class people, young people typically vote in dramatically lower numbers in special elections."[19] Sawant also published a piece in Jacobin titled, "Why I Signed the Petition for My Own Recall." Click here to read it.
The Recall Sawant campaign wrote to King County Elections saying it intended to get the recall on the November ballot and welcomed Sawant's assistance, adding, "We request a public statement of the legal process for returning the signed recall petitions to King County Elections to help abate voter confusion. We are concerned that third parties who collect signatures are confusing the voters and may be planning to not to turn them over to the recall committee and disposing of them to commit voter suppression."
King County Elections said that only the Recall Sawant campaign could hand in signatures to the office. Election officials said it was legal for the Sawant campaign to collect signatures but that the signatures must be given to the Recall Sawant campaign for verification and submission.[20]
Ballotpedia covered 35 coronavirus-related recall efforts against 94 officials in 2022, accounting for 13% of recalls that year. This is a decrease from both 2020 and 2021. COVID-related recalls accounted for 37% of all recall efforts in both 2020 and 2021. In 2020, there were 87 COVID-related recalls against 89 officials, and in 2021, there were 131 against 214 officials.
The chart below compares coronavirus-related recalls to recalls for all other reasons in 2020, 2021, and 2022.
See also
- Recall campaigns in Washington
- Political recall efforts, 2020
- Political recall efforts, 2021
- City council recalls
- City elections in Seattle, Washington (2019)
- City elections in Seattle, Washington (2015)
External links
Footnotes
- ↑ 1.0 1.1 King County, "King County Elections Certifies Recall Petition for Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant and Prepares for December Recall Election," Sepember 30, 2021
- ↑ King County Elections, "2021 results, December Recall Election," accessed December 8, 2021
- ↑ 3.0 3.1 3.2 Seattle Post-Intelligencer, "Judge rules recall petition against Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant can move forward," September 16, 2020
- ↑ 4.0 4.1 4.2 My Northwest, "Kshama Sawant files appeal with state Supreme Court over recall petition," October 8, 2020
- ↑ Q13 Fox Seattle, "Recall effort against Seattle Council member Kshama Sawant can move forward, state Supreme Court rules," April 1, 2021
- ↑ 7.0 7.1 King 5 News, "State Supreme Court allows effort to recall Seattle Councilmember Kshama Sawant to proceed," April 1, 2021
- ↑ 8.0 8.1 The Seattle Times, "Campaign to recall Seattle council’s Kshama Sawant submits signatures for possible winter election," September 8, 2021
- ↑ 9.0 9.1 The Seattle Times, "Campaigns for and against recall of Seattle council’s Kshama Sawant gear up as signature gathering begins," May 3, 2021
- ↑ The Stranger, "Everything You Need to Know About the Sawant Recall," November 9, 2021
- ↑ King5, "Sawant recall election divides Seattle's Central District, Capitol Hill neighborhood," December 4, 2021
- ↑ 12.0 12.1 The Seattle Times, "Effort to recall Seattle Councilmember Kshama Sawant leads with 53% in Tuesday night vote count," December 7, 2021
- ↑ King County Elections, "2021 results, December Recall Election," accessed December 17, 2021
- ↑ King County Elections, "sample-ballot.ashx," accessed November 22, 2021
- ↑ 15.0 15.1 My Northwest, "Group submits petition to recall Seattle Councilmember Kshama Sawant," August 19, 2020
- ↑ 16.0 16.1 My Northwest, "Washington Supreme Court sets timeline for Sawant appeal of recall petition," November 13, 2020
- ↑ Seattle Post-Intelligencer, "Kshama Sawant recall appeal heads to Washington Supreme Court in January," December 4, 2020
- ↑ Cite error: Invalid
<ref>tag; no text was provided for refs nameddelay - ↑ KIRO7, "Councilmember Sawant’s team announces new strategy to defeat recall campaign," July 10, 2021
- ↑ MyNorthwest, "Election officials say Sawant supporters can continue collecting recall signatures," July 15, 2021
