The following editorial originally appeared in The Seattle Times:
The travesty of governance carried out by the Washington State Redistricting Commission of 2021 must never be repeated. The panel didn’t just miss a long-established Nov. 15 deadline for approving political maps. It was worse.
The voting commissioners — two Republicans, two Democrats — made a mockery of the state’s open-meetings laws, furtively darting out of public view for closed-door haggling over district borders. Then they voted on maps that hadn’t even been drawn, like students hastily scribbling homework to beat a class bell. All under the supervision of a nonvoting chair, who apparently didn’t raise effective concern about hiding the people’s business.
A smoking crater has supplanted decades of pride in Washington’s carefully constructed commission. It was possible, previously, to believe Washington stood above the fray of gerrymandering wars because the commission structure required bipartisan consensus. Now the Legislature needs to pass strong reforms and repair its credibility.
Senate Bill 5560, authored by Sen. Jamie Pedersen, D-Seattle, nudges the door open a crack, but it falls far short of the strong medicine needed to heal the credibility of Washington redistricting. The Senate passed its weak-tea reforms unanimously Wednesday afternoon after scant discussion, finding too little of consequence to draw even performative debate.
Pedersen conceded his bill was “not all of the changes that everyone thinks ought to happen” but was “targeted at a few of the problems.” Lawmakers ought to try harder for real reform while the failures of November glow hot in memory, rather than letting a small-time fix shortstop the momentum.
The bill reforms only some of the egregious loopholes the last commission exploited. Redistricting commissioners should have to submit their maps for public inspection before taking votes to approve them. And it’s apparently mandatory to be more specific with the requirement in state law to “submit a plan to the Legislature” by Nov. 15. A sketchy, mapless framework is not a plan.
But these improvements don’t touch the closed-door collusion of Republicans and Democrats to horse-trade control of the state, district by district. Good reform should require public negotiations between commissioners.
The two major political parties enjoy too much power to draw self-serving maps, and long have. Transparent governance in action this wasn’t.
Redistricting ought to be the people’s work, not the parties’ privilege. It should happen in public view. Passing SB 5560 without stronger transparency reforms would miss an opportunity to leverage righteous outrage from the 2021 debacle into a better law to guide the 2031 Redistricting Commission, and the ones assembled in the decades after that.
Even if this bill is enacted into law, redistricting reform is not done.
