In August, you will be asked to vote on this:The City Council is authorized to decide whether to issue the notice referenced in Section 2.3 of each Agreement. That decision shall be made at an open public meeting held after issuance of the Final Environmental Impact Statement.Approve or reject?If approve, what are you approving? If reject, what are you rejecting? The council’s authority? Its authority to decide? Your authority to decide the council’s authority to decide? Is Jean Godden a babe?Answer: None of the above. You’re approving or rejecting the whole two lines, which constitute a city ordinance.

Depending on whom you ask, if we approve the ordinance, we dig the waterfront tunnel. Reject it, and we’ll have to dig up a new ordinance and start over. It doesn’t seem to be a vote on the tunnel. But this is Seattle, home of The Process, and it is oozing forward again. Tunnel opponents says the vote is symbolic. Take it from an expert, Tim Eyman. The I-Man happens to live in Mukilteo and doesn’t build tunnels. But he showed up at the Seattle council meeting yesterday to lend his expertise on what the referendum means. “Whatever the wording,” he said, “it’s a vote on the tunnel.” There you have it.It’s possible he could be wrong. The vote is considered advisory. And the council can always vote in another ordinance. If nobody likes that one, they can vote again.That’s Seattle. We vote.

The council, by an 8-1 margin, has already voted on what it plans to do: build a waterfront tunnel. They’re confident it will happen. The public has voted on the issue a couple times too. But those outcomes didn’t seem to matter. The last time, voters were against a tunnel–but didn’t say what they were for. Since then, polls show 50 percent support a tunnel, 50 percent support a surface solution, and 50 percent support the viaduct (about the same as its pilings). So here we are.Some council members refer to the latest upcoming public vote as the Seinfeld referendum, because, like the TV show, it’s about nothing. The yadda-yadda election. But voting is the way Seattle gets things done–or not.

We vote to take votes. We vote how to take votes. We vote to not take votes. And that’s at just one council meeting.Publicly, we vote against things we end up getting–a baseball stadium–and for things we end up losing–a $1.6 billion Monorail. (After it became an $11 billion Monorail, we voted it down.)Now we will vote on a vote–the council’s–perhaps to make them take another vote. All of which could be meaningless. Like voting.Anyone for voting against voting? Sigh–OK, let’s vote on it.Follow The Daily Weekly on Facebook and Twitter.