Another voice against districts for city council elections

Published 5:37 pm Monday, December 2, 2013

After Seattle voters decided to start electing most of their city council members by district, council members in Edmonds and Lynnwood said here that they don’t want their cities to follow suit.

Many said they fear that the cities could reduce their pools of candidates.

Since then Randy Hayden, who lost a November election for Edmonds City Council, added his voice.

“Last election we had six candidates for three seats,” Hayden said. “Three of those candidates lived within blocks of each other. A district system would have forced these three to run against each other and opened the door for districts to have candidates run unopposed or even to not be represented.”

Evan Smith can be reached at schsmith@frontier.com.