CLC and co-counsel are suing to ensure that the voting strength of Latino voters is not unlawfully diluted in state legislative elections in Washington’s Yakima Valley region, so that all voters have an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice.
Back to topVoters should be able to elect leaders that best serve their communities. In Washington state’s Yakima Valley, Campaign Legal Center and our clients and co-counsel have been fighting for fair maps for Latino voters since 2022.
Once again, voters have successfully defended their right to fair representation in state government.
How did we get here?
I...
Campaign Legal Center (CLC) and co-counsel, the UCLA Voting Rights Project, Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), and Morfin Law Firm, PLLC, are representing individual Latino voters in a federal lawsuit challenging the 2021 state legislative map drawn by the Washington State Redistricting Commission (commission) as having the intent and effect of diluting the voting power of Latino voters in violation of Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act (VRA).
Washington’s Yakima Valley region is home to a large and compact Latino voting population that shares numerous common interests and needs. The region’s Latino community has also experienced a long and ongoing history of racial discrimination, as well as a lack of responsiveness from elected officials. Moreover, elections in the area routinely exhibit voting that is highly polarized by race, which prevents Latino voters from having an equal opportunity to elect their preferred candidates to the state legislature.
In light of these conditions, the region’s Latino community advocated for a district following the 2020 census that would allow them an equal voice in state legislative elections (“opportunity district”). But in drawing a new legislative district map in 2021, the commission ignored the region’s Latino community, and instead configured the area’s state legislative district 15 to only appear to be an opportunity district, while in actuality denying Latino voters an equal voice.
To do so, the commissioners ignored alternative proposed maps and drew the district to contain only a bare majority of Latino citizen voters, included in the district areas with low Latino voter turnout and higher white turnout, and numbered the district so it would align with lower turnout, off-year elections. Election results (and analysis provided to the commission) confirmed that the district was unlikely to allow Latino voters an equal opportunity to elect candidates of their choice to the legislature in violation of the VRA.
In 2022, CLC and partners filed a complaint alleging that the enacted plan had the intent and effect of diluting Latino voting strength in the Yakima Valley region in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington.
In response, a member of the state legislature (representing an entirely different district) and two voters intervened in the litigation to defend legislative district 15. Discovery in the case unveiled evidence of the discriminatory intent and effect of the district, as well as the overtly partisan motivations behind intervenors’ involvement in the lawsuit.
Extraordinarily, it was also uncovered that a racial gerrymandering lawsuit that was later filed in an attempt to strike down legislative 15 for partisan gain was orchestrated by the very commissioner who drew legislative district 15. Despite orchestrating the racial gerrymandering claim, the commissioner expressly disclaimed that the district was a racial gerrymander. After a four-day trial, the court ruled on August 10, 2023 in favor of the Plaintiffs on the effects claim, finding that the challenged district 15 violated the VRA. After a remedial phase, the court subsequently adopted a revised, legally compliant state legislative map submitted by the Plaintiffs on March 14, 2024.
Following these victories for our clients, the state did not appeal. Instead, intervenors alone filed an appeal to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, but the Ninth Circuit ruled against the intervenors, holding that they lacked standing to appeal the district court’s liability decision, and that the remedial map complied with federal law. The intervenors have since filed a petition for certiorari to the United States Supreme Court, which CLC and our co-counsel have opposed on behalf of our clients.
Background
In the past decade, a number of successful lawsuits under the VRA and the Washington Voting Rights Act (WVRA) have required several jurisdictions in the Yakima Valley region to reconfigure their election systems and district maps so as to not dilute Latino voting strength. For example, both the City of Yakima and City of Pasco did so after suits were filed under the federal VRA.
More recently, CLC and co-counsel MacDonald Hoague & Bayless brought a suit against the at-large system of election used in Yakima County, which diluted the voting strength of the county’s Latino voters. This was the first case ever brought under the WVRA. CLC and co-counsel obtained a historic settlement resulting in changes to the county’s election system that will for the first time allow Latino voters an equal opportunity to elect their candidates of choice to the county board. Latino voters also successfully challenged Franklin County’s election system for diluting Latino voting power under the WVRA, reaching a settlement to change to single-member districts.
These lawsuits show that the large population of Latino voters in the Yakima Valley region routinely experience vote dilution, and the suits have developed voluminous evidence of the high levels of racially polarized voting and discrimination faced by Latino voters. The repeated pattern of vote dilution in the region demonstrates the need for a majority-Latino state legislative district that provides Latino voters in the area, which share commonalities and interests based on more than just race or ethnicity, an equal voice in elections.
