Washington elections bill ‘generates more distrust in the system’

A bill sent to Washington Gov. Jay Inslee for consideration would exempt various aspects of the election system from public records requests and centralize all local records requests with the Secretary of State's office.

While supporters of Senate Bill 5459 say the bill will protect private information about voters and the technology used in ballot counting, critics argue that it will make citizens less trusting of the election process.

"In my idea, [it] just generates more distrust in the system," Rep. Leonard Christian, R-Spokane Valley, told colleagues on the House floor. The bill passed the House along party lines, while only four legislators opposed it during the Senate vote.

Under existing law, citizens can submit public record requests regarding their local voting system with the county auditor. Since the 2020 election, the number of requests has increased from 400 in 2019 to 1,300 in 2022, according to the Washington Association of County Auditors.

SB 5459 would centralize all those requests with SOS, which has a statewide voter database.

The bill also exempts certain aspects of the voting system involving private contractors. Any records of the system infrastructure would be withheld from the public for 25 years if the contractor says releasing the records would put the system at risk.

A new Public Records Act exemption would be created for voted ballots or copies and images of them.

Cosponsor Sen. Sam Hunt, D-Olympia, told the House Committee on State Government & Tribal Relations at a March 22 public hearing that "this is really a security and efficiency elections bill. People may not understand what we're doing here. We're not prohibiting access to information."

Also testifying in favor of the bill at the March 22 hearing was Stevens County Auditor Lori Larsen. Speaking on behalf of WACA, she said that "elections officials are drowning in public record and data requests," due in part to election "misinformation" and a "general increased desire on the part of voters to understand elections."

Rep. Bill Ramos, D-Issaquah, told colleagues before the April 10 House floor vote that "our election information, our votes and their secrecy is most important to all of us. You don't want to have images, copies, of your actual ballot getting into someone else's hand."

A failed House amendment would have allowed a vote cast to be subject to public disclosure "if it can be provided in a manner that preserves the confidentiality of voters' choices on their ballots." Rep. Peter Abarno, R-Centralia, described it as "a good amendment that brought transparency and confidentiality."

He added that exemptions to public disclosure "are now becoming the rule, and that's not the way the voters of the state of Washington wanted it. In this area, they wanted confidentiality of their specific vote. We had the opportunity to provide that."

Christian said that "in a day when there is more and more distrust in our election system, more folks are denying the results of our election system, we continually carve out more and more pieces and keep the public out of it. The citizens who are voting, we keep telling them 'your vote matters but we're going to just hide what's behind the green curtain of how we're voting and how those votes are being counted.'"