The City of Everett needs to change its voting law governing how ward councilors are elected to public office.
The city must morph from the rather short sighted and foolish proposition that anything democratic is obtained by voting citywide to elect ward councilors as is currently the legal requirement.
The election of ward councilors should be entirely and exclusively a ward affair, geographically and politically.
Why?
Because this was always the fair way to elect ward councilors.
It is not fair to have citywide balloting for ward councilor races. What happens in Ward 6 has almost nothing whatsoever to do with what happens in Ward 1 and vice versa.
What happens in either of those wards and in all the wards should be the political property of those who live in those wards, and not in wards all over the city.
There is the belief citywide balloting disturbs the racial underpinnings of the city. This is to say, that Everett minorities are given less a chance to get themselves elected with citywide votes than ward votes only under the present voting system.
The harsh reality is not so much racial as it is something that affects all Everett residents.
It was the late Speaker of the House Tip O’Neill who famously said that all politics is local.
The politics of each ward is something unto itself.
Each ward has its own social flavor and history, its own reason to exist and neighborhoods that differ from others in the city.
Each ward deserves to elect its own ward councilor without the interference of voters in other wards.
This is simply the way it always was and the way it should again be. The city government must work quickly to put back in place ward elections designed to maintain and to perpetuate the power structure of individual wards having an individual or collective say over the city as whole.
It is a bit like individual states having rights over the federal government being a bit more tolerable than the federal government calling all the shots.