From Blythe Serrano, volunteer coordinator with the Kshama Solidarity Campaign and a resident of the Central District

As of last week, the right-wing Recall Campaign against Kshama Sawant began moving ahead with its signature collection effort. Ironically initiators of this attempt to remove Seattle’s most progressive Councilmember are now arguing that their campaign is not a corporate-backed, right-wing initiative. Yet at the same time they continue to employ Republican voter suppression tactics. The Recall doth protest too much!

The very nature of the Recall campaign is right-wing from top to bottom: it is an attack on the right to protest, on Black Lives Matter, and on Kshama Sawant for her role in supporting social movements. All three charges that were upheld by the court earlier this month attempt to recall Councilmember Sawant for doing what she was elected to do: stand unambiguously with working people and oppressed communities. This recall campaign is part of a broader attack on the right to protest, including 81 anti-protest bills being introduced by Republicans around the country, in response to last year’s historic Black Lives Matter protests.

The Recall’s donors include a slew of wealthy Republicans such as billionaire ICE landlord Martin Selig, former Boeing CEO Frank Shrontz, venture capital director Dennis Weibling, digital marketing CEO Vidur Luthra, and online casino founder Greg Eneil. The Recall Campaign also has the backing of far-right publication Breitbart magazine, local right-wing radio host Jason Rantz, and has been proudly proclaimed by the far-right Patriot Journal to be a “Republican movement.

Around the country a widespread campaign of voter suppression is taking place, to systematically underrepresent the votes of people of color, the working class, and the poor. Earlier this month, Republican Georgia Governor Brian Kemp signed into law a bill “unlike anything we’ve seen since the Jim Crow era.” This bill (SB202) makes voting more difficult by introducing additional photo ID requirements, reducing the number of ballot boxes, and shrinking the window for early voting. It also hands control of how election law is enforced over to a single unelected administrator appointed by the Republican state legislature. Other states, including Texas and Arizona, are following suit with their own voter suppression bills.

In Seattle, the Recall Campaign is now adopting this classic Republican tactic in their undemocratic attempts to overturn Kshama’s re-election and remove her from office. The same forces that have tried and failed to defeat Kshama in the last 3 elections have wised up and realized they need to find a way to create a more favorable electorate for them. The Recall’s campaign manager H. John Bridger II told Capitol Hill Seattle just last month that they explicitly want to avoid the November general election ballot, preferring a “special election” where voter turnout is a mere fraction of a general election In order to achieve this, the Recall filed court motions to try and extend the deadline for their signature gathering to help delay the recall election past November.

They have been supported in this effort by King County Superior Court Judge Jim Rogers who has granted the Recall an extra 20 days to gather signatures based on nothing, firmly giving the Recall the cover to avoid the November General Election. Judge Rogers also ruled in the favor of the Recall on a number of other issues including ballot language which falsely alleged Kshama has been convicted of the charges. In 2019 this same Jim Rogers echoed the themes of the disastrous ‘war on drugs’ rhetoric while denying the homelessness and housing affordability crisis in the city, saying “Don’t call this a homeless crisis…Most of the people we see around the courthouse and I see it where I live, which is in the University District near the UW, are drug addicts.” The courts have never been neutral in the battle for social and economic justice and here they are not so again.

But why? It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Recall Campaign wants a low-turnout winter special election, as the Capitol Hill Seattle Blog openly speculates in the same article, rather than a high-turnout general election in November. And certainly H. John Bridger II is correct in thinking that this would be beneficial for his campaign – special elections are always more favorable to the right wing precisely because they have much lower voter turnout of people of color, working class people, and young people. This is just voter suppression by another name. The Recall wants to silence Seattle’s only elected socialist by trying to ensure that the voices of working and marginalized people in our diverse district are not heard at the ballot box.

Despite their claims of representing regular people in District 3, we know the Recall actually represents the interests of big business and the right wing – one only needs to look at their wealthy donor base to see who’s behind this effort. Regular people in District 3 have made their voices heard by electing Kshama Sawant three times now, despite fierce opposition from the right wing and big corporations such as Amazon, which spent $1.5 million to try and unseat her in 2019 and failed.

These undemocratic attacks are very serious, but we know that voter suppression is not a new phenomenon – it has a long and deeply racist history in the United States. It should come as no surprise that the same recall campaign that is attacking Kshama for her support of Black Lives Matter and the Tax Amazon movement is willing to utilize racist, anti-worker tactics to get their way.

Now more than ever, it is clear that voting alone won’t be enough defend Kshama and our movement’s victories – from the Amazon Tax to the “crowd control” weapons ban to the $15 minimum wage – in a system that is rigged against us. We need to build a grassroots movement to ensure our voices are heard!

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