Waitsburg City Elections

For this month’s article, I thought I would focus on one of the city most unique attributes; our city election.

Since the city still operates under its original 1881 charter, we are governed by a slightly different set of rules when it comes to a variety of tasks; one of them being our election.

The charter lays out the basics process of the Election in that it will be held annually on the first Monday in April for the position of Mayor and all five council members. Where this deviates from the rest of the state is in that other elected officials; whether it be a school board member, county commissioner, or some other position elected by a vote of the people carries at least a four-year term. In addition, the city election is held in April of each year, opposed to everyone else whose general election occurs in November. Lastly, city hall staff is responsible for the annual election and the development of the ballot, mailing, and vote tallying. All other elections are handled by the corresponding county election department.

Though there have been attempts over the years to change the process and move away from the charter (last effort was in 2012), throughout most of the city’s history, the process to get your name onto the Ballot was done through a caucus system, historically sponsored by the Waitsburg Commercial Club. The purpose of the caucus was to produce a slate of candidates for that year’s ballot and typically included a theme and party name, i.e. “Citizens for Good Government”. The process to hold a caucus is pretty loose, with no real notice requirements, but must follow a set of rules established by the city to be considered valid. Most years there was only one caucus that produced the list of candidates for the annual election. It however was not uncommon for a group of citizens, unhappy with the proposed slate of candidates, to hold a second caucus relatively soon after the first one as a means to get their slate of candidates onto the ballot. Many time,s there was overlapping names and on rare occasions, there was even a third caucus held.

In recent years, the city has added a secondary option for people interested in being on city council, but not interested in being associated with a particular caucus. Known as a declaration of candidacy, this process allows an individual to essential sign up for the election and have their name put on the ballot rather and go through the caucus system.

For the 2018 election, caucuses are allowed to be held between 35 and 25 days prior to the election, which is between February 26th and March 8 this year. Declarations of candidacies are available for the first 10 days in March. With a full slate of candidates, ballots are typically mailed out two weeks prior to the election. In the event a full slate of candidates is not filed with the city, the process automatically reopens for a couple extra weeks; pushing the election back to the third Monday in April.

Up until 2006, elections were done at a local polling place, typically Town Hall, with results posted on the door at city hall after the election was closed and votes tallied. With changes to state election laws, the city followed suit and now does its election completely by mail in balloting. The last time there was a polling place election, only 80 ballots were cast in person as compared to 323 cast in last year’s election through the mail in process.

As for the future of our election process, the State of Washington is in process of updating the State voting rights act that in a nut shell will require any district with a population of 1,000 to separate into wards or districts. For us, it would mean attempting to find two people in various areas of the city that would have to run for election against one another. There are of course other nuances to the update, but since the city of Waitsburg does not follow the general election laws of the state, the impact to our process is not exactly known yet. With my experience with our election, I feel that it will be difficult in the future to produce a full slate of candidates with districts rather than an overall set of at large positions.

Should the update be deemed applicable to the city of Waitsburg, it may be time to finally change our process and move in alignment with the state and other voting districts as a means to shield the city from any implied irregularities associated with our process and the outcome of our election. Movement to the state system will create four-year, staggered terms for each of the council positions with the election to be administered by the Walla Walla County Elections office.

With only a few weeks left in this year’s legislative session, it will be interesting where this issue shakes out. Should anyone have any interest in serving on the city council or one of the city various committees or commission, please feel free to contact me at city hall.