PASCO — Franklin County admitted this week that county commissioner elections violate a state voting law by discriminating against Latino voters.
Now, attorneys for the county are asking for time to fix the system so it complies with the Washington Voting Rights Act, according to court documents filed Tuesday.
The county has been accused of keeping Latino voters separated by voting districts and silenced by having at-large elections.
“The size of the Latino population in Franklin County and the existence of polarized voting among its citizens is factually supported,” they wrote in the court documents.
“To argue otherwise, Franklin County would have had to cherry-pick small, outlier precincts that stand contrary to the overall trends of the 105 precincts,” they wrote.
While they agreed that the way commissioners are elected needs to change, they are asking for time to get input on how the districts should be redrawn. They are asking to have until Nov. 15 to present a proposal to the court.
But at least one county commissioner, Clint Didier, doesn’t agree there’s an issue and plans to challenge the constitutionality of the law as a citizen.
The attorneys, Casey Bruner and Asti Gallina, made the statement ahead of a hearing next week when a judge was expected to decide whether Franklin County needed to change how its current districts are drawn as well as the current system of having everyone in the county vote for commissioners in the general election.
Three local members of the League of United Latin American Citizens with help from the UCLA Voting Rights Project sued the county in Franklin County Superior Court in April.
They asked to have a judge decide whether the county was violating a 2018 state law that protects minority groups from not being able to pick a candidate of their choice.
The heavily Latino precincts in east Pasco vote differently than the majority white precincts in other sections of the county. But those east Pasco precincts are split up between the three commissioner districts, according to the Voting Rights Project.
Their votes are further diluted because if they get a candidate past the primary, the entire county then votes in the general election.
While the county’s attorneys said the system obviously violates state and federal law, they argued it wasn’t intentional.
The system has been used for decades “to ensure that candidates represent each individual area within the county ... but that the elected officials are responsive to the citizens from all areas of the county.”
Three local residents and the UCLA project asked for a judgment in July after filing the lawsuit the April. While it was initially scheduled for a hearing in August, the county asked to wait until after the results from the 2020 U.S. Census were released.
Those results showed 53 percent of the nearly 97,000 people living in Franklin County are Latino.
There are about 66,000 people who can vote and, of those, 32,500 are Latino.
Census data from 2017 showed Latinos accounted for a third of the voting population.
Even in this case, if they divided the county between three equal districts, it is possible to create a district of about 32,000 that is majority Latino.
Census data also shows most of the precincts in Pasco east of Highway 395 are 70 to 90 percent Latino.
When they looked across elections they found those Latino-heavy districts voted differently than the majority white districts.
”Many races were analyzed by Franklin County in this fashion and the trends were consistent,” according to the county’s attorneys.
While the differences could be because of party preferences, the state law could still be violated.
