Welch: Washington has five years to get redistricting right
Published 1:30 am Wednesday, May 13, 2026
On April 29, the Supreme Court ruled in Louisiana v. Callais that intentionally drawing legislative districts based on race violates the Equal Protection Clause, even when done in the name of compliance with the Voting Rights Act. Justice Alito wrote that allowing race to play any part in government decision-making departs from the constitutional rule that applies in almost every other context.
The Court got this right. Race-conscious redistricting did not produce fair maps. It produced maps where political operatives sorted voters by racial category and called it justice. The maps that resulted were neither compact, nor community-driven, nor honest. They were political instruments dressed in civil rights language.
Washington holds its next redistricting cycle in 2031. That is five years. The Callais ruling clears away one form of map manipulation. Now Washington has the opportunity to clear out the other form, partisan gerrymandering, by replacing its party-appointed commission with something the commission has never been: transparent, auditable, and geography-based.
What Washington has now
The Washington State Redistricting Commission has four voting members: two Democrats and two Republicans, appointed directly by the majority and minority caucus leaders in the House and Senate. Every seat at the table is filled by a party appointee. The parties are in the room from day one, before a single line is drawn. Calling this “independent” redistricting stretches the word past its limit.
The 2021 cycle illustrated the system’s fragility. The four commissioners could not agree by the November 15 deadline. The maps went to the Washington Supreme Court, which allowed them to proceed. Commissioners were later fined $500 each for violating the state’s public meetings law during closed-door final negotiations. Then a federal court struck the legislative maps entirely after a judge ruled they diluted Hispanic voting power in the Yakima Valley.
That is the track record going into 2031: missed deadlines, open meetings violations, fines, and maps thrown out by a federal court. The commission was drawing maps with two sources of bias simultaneously: partisan inputs and racial inputs. The Court just eliminated the legal cover for one of them. Washington voters have the opportunity to eliminate the other.
The case for an algorithm
Washington’s constitution already requires that districts be contiguous, compact, and convenient, following natural geographic and political subdivision boundaries. The commission is also prohibited from drawing plans to favor or discriminate against any political party. Those are exactly the right requirements. The problem is that four party-appointed commissioners are the ones deciding whether they have been met. That is like asking the defendant to write the verdict.
A geometry-based algorithm cannot be partisan. It has no career to protect, no incumbent to shield, no caucus to answer to, and no racial category to optimize for. It applies the same rules to every square mile of the state and surfaces the maps that best satisfy the criteria Washington law already demands.
A well-designed system for Washington would layer its constraints in sequence. First, equal population, a federal requirement. Second, contiguity. Third, minimizing county and city splits so communities retain coherent political representation. Fourth, optimizing for the Reock Score, a measure of district compactness that compares a district’s area to the smallest circle that can contain it. A district that snakes across a state to cherry-pick voters scores low. A compact district reflecting where people actually live scores high.
Washington’s geography makes this approach especially well-suited. The Cascades divide the state into two distinct political and economic cultures. Puget Sound and the coastline create natural boundaries any honest mapmaker should follow. The overwhelming majority of the population lives along the I-5 corridor between Everett and Tacoma, with Spokane as the second major urban anchor. An algorithm optimizing for population equality and compactness together will naturally produce districts that reflect where people actually live. The commission has political incentives to shade lines away from that natural result. The algorithm does not.
Transparency is the point
When you apply population equality, contiguity, split minimization, and compactness optimization in sequence, you get something the commission has never delivered: a map with a publicly auditable score on every criterion, for every district. Not a map where four political operatives sat in a room until 2 a.m. and agreed on something they could not fully explain the next morning. A map with a number attached to every decision, every tradeoff, every district. Every number derived from geography and population, not from a party strategist’s spreadsheet.
Any citizen could rerun the algorithm. Any journalist could audit the inputs and weights. Any court could review the methodology. Compare that to the commission’s final negotiations, which already earned each commissioner a fine for violating the state’s public meetings law.
The path forward
Washington has a citizen initiative process. The current commission was created by ballot initiative in 1983. It can be reformed the same way. A 2030 ballot initiative would replace the commission’s line-drawing authority with an algorithm-based system, establish a small nonpartisan technical review panel drawn from the state’s universities, require an up-or-down legislative vote on the top-scoring map, and sunset the partisan commission model permanently.
Signature gathering for a 2030 measure opens in 2029. That gives advocates three years to build coalitions and draft initiative language. Five years total from today. Other states will spend those years relitigating redistricting in both directions, some trying to restore race-conscious map drawing through state law workarounds, others using the Callais ruling as cover for naked partisan gerrymandering. Washington does not have to follow either path.
The state already has a constitutional requirement for compact, contiguous districts. It already prohibits maps drawn to favor any political party. It already has a tradition of redistricting reform through the ballot initiative process. The Supreme Court established that the Constitution requires race-neutral redistricting. Washington can go further and demonstrate that it also requires party-neutral redistricting, using the same tool: an algorithm that sees only geography and population, and nothing else.
That is not a radical idea. It is what the state constitution has required since 1983. The commission just never delivered it.
Todd Welch is an Everett resident, former Lake Stevens City Councilmember, and planning and policy professional.
