KENNEWICK — How Franklin County commissioners are elected will change next year after a state Supreme Court decision issued Thursday, making their elections more fair for Latino voters.
Washington highest court unanimously dismissed the arguments made by a Franklin County precinct committee officer that the Washington Voting Rights Act was unconstitutional.
More broadly, the decision was hailed as a big win for voting rights across the country.
“As a moment when those rights are under sustain assault nationwide, the court has affirmed that state law and state courts can protect against discrimination in elections,” Yurij Rudensky, senior counsel for Brennan Center for Justice at NYU Law, said in a news release.
The court ordered James Gimenez to pay the attorney fees for the UCLA Voting Rights Projects attorneys who helped three local members of the League of United Latin American Citizens bring the case.
The amount will be determined at a later time by a Franklin County Superior Court judge.
Gimenez wanted to overturn the settlement agreement that brought an end to the yearlong legal battle between the county and the group who said Latino voters weren’t getting a fair shake at electing a candidate because their votes were being diluted.
The agreement changes how the commissioners are picked starting in 2024.
Justice Mary Yu wrote in her 44-page opinion that Gimenez’s attorney Joel Ard was trying to argue that the law protects some racial groups while excluding others.
“Gimenez’s arguments cannot succeed because his reading of the statute is incorrect,” Yu wrote. “The WVRA protects all Washington voters from discrimination on the basis of race, color and language minority group.”
Sonni Waknin with the UCLA Voting Rights Project said the decision shows that the voting rights act protects all voters.
“Mr. (Gabriel) Portugal, Mr. (Brandon) Morales, and Mr. (Jose) Trinidad Corral’s efforts in Franklin County will ensure that starting in 2024 all voters in the County have the ability to elect candidates of choice through district-based elections. We are excited to see the County educate voters on the new electoral system and are available to assist with that education process,” she told the Herald.
Ard was not available Thursday to comment on the ruling.
The decision is the latest turn in a case that has stretched through two years of litigation, was resolved twice and led to the county firing one of its three attorneys.
It started with the three Franklin County voters who are members of the League of United Latin American Citizens challenging both the structure of the commissioner districts and how they are elected.
Their attorneys argued that the commissioner districts split up the largely Latino section of east Pasco, effectively watering down their candidate choice in the primary.
But even if a candidate manages to advance, the at-large elections in the general election could mean that the predominately white voting populace could overrule their choice, according to court documents.
The county agreed to settle the lawsuit in May 2022. The agreement said the 2024 election would become district-based and the county would pay $375,000 to end the suit.
In exchange, the county would get to keep the district boundaries that the commissioners had signed off on earlier in the year.
The boundaries already were being redrawn to adjust for population changes based on census results to ensure each district had about the same number of voters.
The Washington Voting Rights Act aims to protect “race, color or language minority groups” from systems that would deny them the chance of picking a candidate of their choice.
The definition is based on the older Federal Voting Rights Act.
While Ard argued that some groups were favored by the act, Yu said everyone in the state has a race, a color and speaks a language. That means every Washington voter is part of at least one protected class.
“Gimenez appears to argue that the WVRA makes ‘racial classifications’ by recognizing the existence of race, color and language minority groups and prohibiting discrimination on that basis,” the decision said.
“We cannot agree. If Gimenez’s position were correct then every statute prohibiting racial discrimination or mandating equal voting rights would be subject to facial equal protection challenges triggering strict scrutiny. No authority supports that position.”
Ard argued that since the majority of people living in Franklin County are Latino, they can’t be considered a minority.
However, the justices pointed out that Latinos are only a third of the registered voters in the county.
“All of Giminez’s arguments are based on his interpretation of the WVRA’s definition of a protected class. His interpretation is incorrect,” Yu wrote.
