WA lawmakers’ new email policy violates public’s right to know | Editorial

Washington state representatives may delete many of their emails under a revived rule in the Legislature’s lower chamber. This is the latest secrecy measure from lawmakers who have repeatedly proved that they don’t believe the public needs to know what happens behind the scenes in the Capitol.

The policy took effect on July 30 after the House Public Records Office circulated a memo saying that it was reinstating it. It had been suspended during a lawsuit filed by The Associated Press and several state news organizations, including the Tri-City Herald.

The news organizations won, but lawmakers tried other tricks to keep the public in the dark. They invented something called “legislative privilege” and passed a secrecy law that then-Gov. Jay Inslee vetoed after public outcry.

Now they can delete emails before anyone has time to file a public records request. The system will permanently auto-delete emails in representatives’ trash folders after 30 days.

If representatives think that is too long to wait, they can immediately delete “transitory” records. Those include meeting arrangements, as well as any emails about a bill that the representative is not the prime sponsor of.

Those are critical components of the legislative record for anyone who wants to know how a bill became a law. With whom did a lawmaker meet? When? What did lobbyists and constituents send in an email before the vote? Did that lobbying convince a lawmaker to introduce an amendment?

It’s ludicrous to think that only the emails received by the prime sponsor of a bill matter. That ignores the collaborative nature of lawmaking. Elected officials offer amendments, negotiate and share ideas. Then they vote. With controversial bills, every vote matters.

That messy, complicated process produces a final law that sometimes can be far different from what the original sponsor envisioned. The process matters for understanding the final legislation and for holding lawmakers accountable.

The revived policy also creates a troubling inconsistency in state policy. Washington administrative rules explicitly prohibit state agencies from “automatically deleting all emails after a short period of time (such as 30 days).” House members now hold themselves to lower standards than the rest of state government.

Supporters of the change argue that this is mostly about housekeeping. Emails take up space on state servers. The boring transitory ones don’t need to be retained and reviewed every time a public records request comes in.

Yet digital storage space is cheap. The state’s budget runs into the billions. If more hard drives or cloud storage costs a million or two, that is a worthwhile expenditure to ensure that the public can see what lawmakers are doing.

As for whether transitory emails are important, lawmakers are in no position to decide. They are biased observers.

If a representative receives regular personal emails from some lobbyist, wealthy constituent or business urging them to vote a certain way, the representative might deem them transitory under the rules, but they are anything but.

Washingtonians passed the Public Records Act by ballot initiative in 1972. It states, “The people of this state do not yield their sovereignty to the agencies that serve them. The people, in delegating authority, do not give their public servants the right to decide what is good for the people to know and what is not good for them to know. The people insist on remaining informed so that they may maintain control over the instruments that they have created.”

Those principles are as true today as they were more than 50 years ago.

The email deletion policies are not mandatory. Honest representatives who believe in the people they represent will forgo deletion and retain their records.

The rest, the officials who are comfortable with systematic destruction of records, lack the commitment to transparency that democratic governance requires. Voters should hold them accountable on Election Day.