The Pierce County Council should be expanded to preserve democracy | Opinion
As the Pierce County Charter Review Commission meets to recommend changes to our county charter, one major issue commissioners should consider is the number of seats on the county council.
Since the Pierce County government was first chartered in 1981, the county has nearly doubled its population. Despite this significant increase in the number of voters, the number of seats on the county council has remained the same. This situation has led to a dramatic dilution of each individual voter’s ability to influence their government.
This ongoing dilution has serious implications for the county’s democratic character, especially as it relates to minority representation. Throughout the United States, white people tend to be substantially overrepresented in local governments. According to the International City/County Management Association, which surveys local governments in the United States on the demographics of their representatives, white people hold 89% of the legislative seats in local governments, even though they only compose 61% of the population.
In Pierce County, when the charter was first established white people made up 89% of the population. Today, that number has decreased to 72%. Nonetheless, it is only with our most recent county council that racial minority representation — specifically Asian and Latino representatives — has been meaningfully present.
The county council’s lack of racial representation could have serious democratic and legal consequences. In 2012, Latino activists sued the Yakima City Council because the council’s at-large elections consistently diluted the city’s Latino vote. Two years later, the U.S. District Court for Eastern Washington concluded that Yakima’s form of government violated the 1965 Voting Rights Act and ordered the city to adopt a seven-person council with seven unique districts. The lawsuit had a cascading impact throughout Washington politics. In 2018, state legislators passed the Washington Voting Rights Act, which prohibited racial voting dilution. Soon after, both Yakima and Franklin County were forced to change their system of elections, which diluted minority representation by electing county commissioners in districts for the primaries, but utilized at-large elections for the general. Then, in 2023, the Washington Voting Rights Act was strengthened with the passage of HB1048, which required county governments to increase seats if indigenous communities were not fairly represented in county councils.
The Washington Voting Rights Act and HB1048 were meaningful steps forward, but they arguably did not go far enough. The legislation prohibits the use of at-large elections to dilute minority representation, but they do not proactively require local governments to add seats to prevent dilution within districts. What this means is that local governments can experience a slow and creeping process of diluting minority representation through gradual population changes. This situation can only be rectified once a minority group has been effectively locked out of government, and even then, it requires a lawsuit and a potentially lengthy judicial process to change.
Pierce County should not wait until after a group has had their votes diluted to act. Instead, it should work today to expand the county council to include more seats and smaller districts. Ideally, the county would adopt a system of dynamic representation that would lead to an automatic increase in seats as the population of the county increased. This would help ensure that dilution never occurs in the first place.
Neither of these suggestions are radical. If anything, the Pierce County Council lends toward being small when compared to representative bodies in similar counties across the United States.
Of the 14 legislative counties in the United States that have populations between 900,000 and 1,000,000, only half of them have 7 or fewer seats on their county council. Some have more than double the seats than what currently exists in Pierce County, with DuPage County, Illinois and Milwaukee County, Wisconsin both having 18 seats, and Marion County, Indiana having 25 seats.
Indeed, when King County established its charter in 1969, they created a county council with 9 seats. At the time, the population of King County was approximately 1.1 million, which is relatively similar to what Pierce County has today.
As for dynamic representation, while it is less practiced today, it does have a history within the United States. In 1789, James Madison recommended amending the Constitution to include a system of dynamic representation for the House of Representatives. John Addams also favored such a system and included it as part of the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution. Because of this history, Barnstable County, Massachusetts is one of the few counties in the United States that still maintains a system of dynamic representation, as the votes on its county council are weighted to the population of the size of the municipalities that council members represent.
Ensuring minority representation is reason enough to support expanding the county council, but there are a host of other reasons as well that would strengthen Pierce County’s democracy.
Governments with smaller and more numerous districts are better able to represent unique geographic differences, a feature that is critical for rural communities, whose shrinking populations have made it harder for those communities to elect candidates that speak to their specific issues.
Smaller and more numerous districts also shift the balance of power in elections away from big money interest and towards grassroots candidates. A candidate with a small army of volunteers is far more likely to succeed in smaller districts, where supporters can go door-to-door and talk to voters one-on-one, than in larger districts, where voters are more likely to get their information from costly mailers and robocalls.
In general, smaller and more numerous districts make democracy easier. Elected representatives only have so much time in the day. The more people they are expected to represent, the more likely certain groups are going to be left out. By representing fewer voters, representatives can do their job more effectively.
Pierce county should not wait until we reach a crisis of representation, including a potential lawsuit as a consequence of voter dilution. Instead, the Charter Review Commissioners should proactively set up our county government so that it can accurately reflect the will of the people now and well into the future.
Marco Rosaire Rossi is the executive director of Washingtonians for Public Banking and an adjunct professor of political science at Cascadia Community College and Olympic Community College.