Sydney Wissel has always been drawn to cemeteries. When she was a teenager in Seattle, she would hang out at Mt. Pleasant or Evergreen Washelli, and read poetry.
“Very much a gothic stereotype,” Wissel said, laughing.
A few years ago, Wissel bought a home in Spokane, a little ways from an old “pioneer cemetery” named Moran. It wasn’t exactly a peaceful place. There’s an elementary school next door with a playground, and the cemetery itself was unmowed, with bare patches of dirt, weeds, dead rose bushes, and little pinwheels and plastic flowers on the graves, Wissel said.
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But when Wissel got her property tax bills and noticed some of her taxes went to “Moran Cemetery District,” she looked online and found it was a public graveyard, with an elected commission, with an open seat.
She couldn’t figure out much about who was on the commission or what it did. So last year, Wissel ran for cemetery commissioner to learn more about how her tax dollars were being spent.
There are likely more than 100 cemetery districts in Washington state, the Municipal Research and Services Center found in 2012, each with three commissioners elected by the public. During elections, they join a host of other elected positions representing a variety of districts — nearly 1700 statewide — including fire protection districts, school districts, park districts, port districts, transportation districts, sewer districts, weed districts, mosquito control districts, and even television reception improvement districts.
All of those districts ask voters either to pick their leadership or vote on bonds and annexations. This November, along with voting for president, Snohomish County voters will elect a new public utility district commissioner to a six-year term. Over 500 offices in Washington state will appear on November ballots across Washington, including judges, justices, and Pierce County’s sheriff.
Statewide, Washington is electing more statewide executives this year — including lieutenant governor, state insurance commissioner, state treasurer, state auditor, and superintendent of public instruction — than any state in the union except for North Carolina, which also elects labor and agriculture commissioners, according to the Book of the States from the Council of State Governments.
Is it all too much — not just in this state, but in this country?
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The Byzantine ballot’s populist roots
Rick Pildes, a constitutional expert at New York University School of Law, thinks America is overdoing it.
“No other democracy uses elections to fill so many offices, and I think that, particularly for lower-level offices, turnout can be extremely low,” Pildes said. “When I was voting on judges, I myself, as a law professor, often didn't have any idea who these judge or judicial candidates are. And if I'm in that position, you can only imagine what most voters are like.”
The Byzantine ballot in America has its roots about a century ago, Pildes said, when progressive reformers hoped to get rid of cronyism pervading political appointments. Many of Washington's statewide executives are even older, and were created by the state constitution in the late 19th century.
Today, about 500,000 offices are elected across America. (Some, like Washington’s statewide executives, have existed for more than 100 years.
Marty Wattenberg, a political scientist at UC Irvine, said when he lectures in Europe, he sometimes brings a sample ballot from an off-year election, like the one Sydney Wissel ran in last year. Europeans “are always amazed that Americans put up with all this,” he wrote in an email.
In an election like this year’s in Washington, these lesser-known offices will share the ballot with the president, senators, four major initiatives dealing with taxes, climate and energy, and a host of local initiatives such as a $1.5 billion transportation levy in Seattle.
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Voters often disengage with long ballots, according to Tammy Patrick, chief program officer at the National Association of Election Officials, who has analyzed voting patterns in states where ballots are long.
“When they get to the judges, sometimes you either see that voters skip that section entirely, or they start voting in a pattern," Patrick said. "They'll vote for all of the judges with an Irish last name, they'll vote for all the men or all the women."
In 1990, Washington voters elected an unknown solo-practice attorney who hadn’t really campaigned, newspapers reported, to the state Supreme Court. They ousted a respected Chief Justice named Keith Callow.
One pollster went in after the fact and found that what some newspapers called the “Fluke of the Decade” may have happened because voters didn’t like the name “Callow,” a word whose dictionary definition, ironically, means inexperienced and immature. Only one in five registered voters filled out a ballot in that September 1990 election.
Many of these positions are decided in special or odd-year elections, which don’t draw nearly as many voters. Just this year in many parts of the state, there have already been four elections (two primaries and two special elections) with turnout ranging from 30% to 40%.
As a result of low turnout, the voters who do show up tend to be more self-interested in the outcome: A disparate number of teachers elect school boards, and a disparate number of lawyers vote in elections for judges, Pildes said. In cities like Seattle, progressives argue the mayor, city council, and city attorney are more moderate or conservative than the city at large because they’re elected on odd years — when older homeowners vote in larger numbers than young renters. Homeowners vote more often in local elections than renters.
There have been a few moves to trim the ballot, but usually for reasons other than Washingtonians being asked to vote too much. In 2020, in the wake of protests over police brutality, King County voters removed sheriff from the ballot and she is now appointed by the county executive. One thing both the Democrat and Republican candidates for governor this year agree on: We shouldn’t elect a superintendent of public instruction, and the governor should instead appoint one.
But past governors have tried to do that without success, according to state Sen. Sam Hunt (D-Olympia), who worked for Democratic Gov. Booth Gardner in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
“Washington has a real history, going back to the populist days, of not trusting people to make appointments, ‘I want to vote on everything,’” Hunt said.
What does a cemetery commissioner do?
Cemetery Commissioner Sydney Wissel’s stance is sort of in between the two. Her term began this year.
“When I got to the first meeting, I'm like, ‘Well, what do I do? What's the job description?’ And they kind of shrugged their shoulders and said, ‘Well, you come to this meeting,’” Wissel said.
At the meeting, they manage cemetery issues, deciding on contracts for tree pruning and trash pickup. The operating budget for the cemetery only reaches a little over $50,000 a year on the high end, according to the Spokesman-Review, and there’s a part-time secretary who answers the phone and sells and marks the graves when it’s time for someone to be buried.
Wissel says the cemetery is more affordable than others in the area (it was $500 a gravesite in 2020, according to the Facebook page), and there’s a long waitlist.
“I asked, you know, ‘How many graves are left?’ Because it kind of seems pretty full,” Wissel said. “And they don't really know. So I've taken it upon myself to audit it.”
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Wissel is making a plot map. As she’s spent more time in her jurisdiction, the things about the graveyard that Wissel criticized from afar look different close up. The pinwheels and plastic flowers that make it hard to mow the grass are from Eastern European immigrant families in the area visiting their buried relatives, she says. She likes that cemetery commissioners aren’t spending taxpayer money on weed killer, and that the cemetery is more like a natural prairie than a manicured garden.
Wissel is personally a libertarian, and believes government already has its “fingers in too many pies.” If she had her way, all the plots would be filled, the cemetery would be turned over to the parks service, and the cemetery district would cease to exist.
But if the cemetery district is going to be there, her neighbors should be able to elect its managers, Wissel said.
“I'm not going to ever advocate taking away people's right to vote for positions, because I think that's way better that people can vote for them than just letting other elected officials just appoint whoever they want,” she said.
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