Redistricting reform bill gets unanimous vote in the Senate as House tweaks new maps

Some redis­trict­ing-relat­ed news out of the Leg­is­la­ture tonight:

The Sen­ate has giv­en unan­i­mous approval to a bill spon­sored by Sen­a­tor Jamie Ped­er­sen and sup­port­ed by the North­west Pro­gres­sive Insti­tute that would make the work of future Redis­trict­ing Com­mis­sions more trans­par­ent, while the House has approved a con­cur­rent res­o­lu­tion mak­ing minor adjust­ments to the Com­mis­sion’s work prod­uct, which the Supreme Court ruled had been com­plet­ed on time a few weeks ago, even though it actu­al­ly wasn’t.

As sum­ma­rized by non­par­ti­san staff, Sen­ate Bill 5560 would do the following:

• Requires that the Redis­trict­ing Com­mis­sion to make any plan pub­licly avail­able for sev­en­ty-two hours pri­or to vot­ing to approve it.
• Requires any amend­ments to that plan to be debat­ed and vot­ed on in open session.
• Requires at least twen­ty-four hours to pass after any amend­ments to a redis­trict­ing plan are adopt­ed before a vote on final approval.
• Requires that the Com­mis­sion’s sub­mis­sion of a plan to the Leg­is­la­ture include maps and cen­sus unit descriptions.

The bill would pre­clude a repeat of what we saw last Novem­ber, when Com­mis­sion­ers April Sims, Brady Walkin­shaw, Joe Fain, and Paul Graves were work­ing out of pub­lic sight while pre­tend­ing to con­duct redis­trict­ing busi­ness in pub­lic. The bill is mod­est and does­n’t go as far as we would like, but it at least adds a few safe­guards that we cur­rent­ly don’t have in state law.

The roll call was as follows:

Roll Call
SB 5560
Redis­trict­ing plans
3rd Read­ing & Final Passage
2/2/2022

Yeas: 47; Excused: 2

Vot­ing Yea: Sen­a­tors Bil­lig, Braun, Car­lyle, Cleve­land, Con­way, Das, Dhin­gra, Dozi­er, For­tu­na­to, Frockt, Gildon, Hasegawa, Hawkins, Holy, Hon­ey­ford, Hunt, Keis­er, King, Kud­er­er, Liias, Lovelett, Lovick, McCune, Mul­let, Muz­za­ll, Nguyen, Nobles, Pad­den, Ped­er­sen, Ran­dall, Rivers, Robin­son, Rolfes, Sal­daña, Salomon, Sefzik, Shel­don, Short, Stan­ford, Trudeau, Van De Wege, Wag­oner, War­nick, Well­man, Wil­son (Claire), Wil­son (Jeff), Wil­son (Lyn­da)

Excused: Sen­a­tors Brown, Schoesler

Two Repub­li­can sen­a­tors missed the vote, with every­one else vot­ing yea.

The next stop for the bill, after it gets referred, will be the House State Gov­ern­ment & Trib­al Rela­tions Com­mit­tee, chaired by Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Javier Valdez. Redis­trict­ing reform is one of NPI’s top ten leg­isla­tive pri­or­i­ties for 2022, and we hope this leg­is­la­tion will have a sim­i­lar­ly easy path through the House.

For its part, the House sent the Sen­ate a con­cur­rent res­o­lu­tion (HCR 4407) that makes minor changes to the maps cre­at­ed by the Redis­trict­ing Com­mis­sion last autumn. The Con­sti­tu­tion explic­it­ly allows the Leg­is­la­ture to tweak Com­mis­sion-cre­at­ed maps, but such changes must get a two-thirds vote. And these did:

HCR 4407
Redis­trict­ing plan
House vote on 3rd Read­ing & Final Passage
2/2/2022

Yeas: 88; Nays: 7; Excused: 3

Vot­ing Yea: Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Abbarno, Barkis, Bate­man, Berg, Bergquist, Berry, Boehnke, Bronoske, Caldier, Callan, Cham­bers, Chan­dler, Chap­man, Chopp, Cody, Cor­ry, Davis, Dolan, Don­aghy, Duerr, Dufault, Dye, Enten­man, Eslick, Fey, Fitzgib­bon, Frame, Gil­day, Goehn­er, Good­man, Gra­ham, Gregerson, Grif­fey, Hack­ney, Hansen, Har­ris, Hoff, Jacob­sen, John­son, Kir­by, Klick­er, Klip­pert, Klo­ba, Leav­itt, Lekanoff, MacEwen, Macri, May­cum­ber, McEn­tire, Mor­gan, Mos­bruck­er, Orcutt, Orms­by, Ortiz-Self, Orwall, Paul, Peter­son, Ramel, Ramos, Ric­cel­li, Robert­son, Rude, Rule, Ryu, Schmick, Sells, Senn, Shew­make, Sim­mons, Slat­ter, Springer, Steele, Stokes­bary, Stonier, Sul­li­van, Tay­lor, Thai, Tharinger, Valdez, Vick, Volz, Walen, Walsh, Wicks, Wilcox, Wylie, Ybar­ra, Jinkins

Vot­ing Nay: Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Chase, Dent, Har­ris-Tal­ley, McCaslin, Pol­let, San­tos, Young

Excused: Rep­re­sen­ta­tive Kraft, Kretz, Sutherland

Three Democ­rats vot­ed nay: Kristin Har­ris-Tal­ley, Sharon Tomiko San­tos, and Ger­ry Pol­let. They were joined by four Repub­li­cans: Chase, Dent, McCaslin, and Young. Three more Repub­li­cans skipped the vote.

The text of the one hun­dred and thir­ty-one page res­o­lu­tion is here.

HCR 4407 was first read on Jan­u­ary 28th. It went straight to the sec­ond read­ing cal­en­dar, bypass­ing the com­mit­tee process. The res­o­lu­tion did not receive a pub­lic hear­ing before it was brought to the floor and con­sid­ered, nor was any non­par­ti­san staff analy­sis pre­pared and pub­licly post­ed before the vote.

Major­i­ty Leader Pat Sul­li­van told his col­leagues that the res­o­lu­tion con­sists of a set of changes request­ed by coun­ty audi­tors that are “tech­ni­cal in nature” — meant to fix bugs and flaws in the Redis­trict­ing Com­mis­sion’s work product.

The Sen­ate has until ear­ly next week to sign off on the changes.

Mean­while, three redis­trict­ing-relat­ed law­suits remain pend­ing in state and fed­er­al court. Two suits con­cern the Redis­trict­ing Com­mis­sion’s alleged vio­la­tions of the Open Pub­lic Meet­ings Act. One of those was brought by Arthur West and anoth­er was brought by the Wash­ing­ton Coali­tion for Open Government.

The third suit alleges the Com­mis­sion’s work prod­uct vio­lates the Vot­ing Rights Act. That chal­lenge was filed in fed­er­al court in Taco­ma by a coali­tion of plain­tiffs that includes the Mex­i­can Amer­i­can Legal Defense and Edu­ca­tion­al Fund.