Kshama Sawant, the Socialist Alternative Party candidate for Seattle city council, has pulled into a very narrow lead as more votes are counted in her race. The election is non-partisan. Two candidates were on the ballot, Sawant, and the incumbent councilmember. See this story. Thanks to Jim Riley and Pete Healey for this news. There are still many ballots to be counted. Generally, Oregon and Washington election returns on election night are more incomplete than the returns of any other state, because those two states use virtually all-mail ballots, and it takes a longer time to count them.
I know various socialists have been elected to partisan and nonpartisan office in the US over the alst 20 years say, but I can not recall the last time a member of a Trotskyist organization was elected to any office?
I don’t believe the Socialist Workers Party ever elected anyone, though they ran candidates in New York and nationally for a long, long time. This, however, was a “broad left” campaign. A look at the endorsers of the Sawant campaign reads like a “who’s who” of every leftist group with more than 3 members in a major city in this country.
Gee – Who needs any small leftwing parties since the COMMUNIST Donkeys in 1930-1932 ???
P.R. and nonpartisan App.V.
Socialist Action had one of its members elected the Douglass County, WI board of supervisors in 2006 (not sure how long the term was, but I want to say two years.) Before that, I think the Socialist Workers Party had a member on a city council somewhere in CA during the 80s, but I can’t find anything to confirm that.
Seattle uses a non-partisan Top 2 election system. At the primary in August, Sawant received about 35% of the vote, the leader 49%, and a 3rd candidate around 14%. It is fantasy that if RCV had been used that all of those votes for the 3rd candidate would have transferred to her.
Compare to the Minneapolis mayoral election where there were two clear front runners, who would have under an ordinary runoff had an opportunity to campaign for the votes of voters who voted for one of the other 33 candidates. Instead thousands of ballots were discarded.
Another 5,000 or so ballots were added to the totals today and Sawant’s lead is now 400 votes. There may only be one more update with new totals, and that’s tomorrow. Washington state has strict rules for full recounts in close races, so this one will probably take several more days or even longer.
To the best of my knowledge, the group’s name is Socialist Alternative, not Socialist Alternative Party. The only place I have ever seen the latter term is here.
“Top-two” by common vocabulary usage, means a system in which party names are on the ballot but parties had nothing to do with choosing them. So by common word usage, “top-two” should not mean a system with no party labels on the ballot. I would be very surprised to find any news story that ever used the phrase “top-two” to describe a Washington state non-partisan election.
Top Two is descriptive of the system used in in Seattle.
No one has mentioned Ty Moore, the Socialist Alternative candidate who got 47% last week for city council in Minneapolis.
In the “instant runoff”
31.7% of the transfers went to Alondra Cano
20.7% of transfers went to Ty Moore and
47.6% were discarded.
Seattle media are reporting that Richard Conlin has conceded to Kshama Sawant after the lastest vote-count update saw her lead over him increase to almost 1,700 votes. There are few ballots left to count so Conlin might have been simply acknowledging the inevitable.