SPOKANE, Wash. – Washington State Representative Jenny Graham was one of nine legislators to vote against a bill which will make assaulting election workers a felony.

She argues that the bill should have also extended legal protections to signature collectors. 

“I happen to be somebody that very much does support our elections officials, and we do need to make sure that they’re not being harassed,” Graham said. 

Graham says that she voted against the bill, HB 1241, because it did not extend the same felony protections to individuals collecting signatures for state initiatives. 

“They’re the same, this was an elections process in which those election workers need to be protected no less stringently than anybody else that is participating in our elections process,” Graham said. 

Any citizen can collect signatures for ballot initiatives, and they are not county or state elections workers. 

Graham also worries that additional protections for election workers could be weaponized by Democratic policymakers. 

“Looking at both sides of this, there are people that have been harassed on the other side, so we wanted to make sure that if somebody…expressed concern, because we’ve heard about this before, where you have elections workers that, you know, there’s been disagreement there. So we did not want to also see this being weaponized against other people,” Graham said. 

The bill was introduced due to a series of state-wide safety concerns which occurred during the 2023 election cycle. 

Elections workers in Spokane County had to vacate their offices after being mailed an envelope containing fentanyl during the Nov. 2023 general elections. 

Graham said that the workers didn’t really leave the office. 

“It’s been confirmed that while they were reporting that the elections office was closed down, there were people that were actually working those elections that were saying ‘no, they never stopped counting,’ they continued to count,” Graham said. “So if there was that big of a worry that these people were in danger, why didn't you do what you said, and shut it down?” 

The affected areas of the Spokane County Elections Office were evacuated on Nov. 8, 2023 according to the Spokane Fire Department Hazardous Materials Team, the Spokane Police Department and the Spokane County Auditor. 

As of the publishing of this article, there is no evidence that Spokane County failed to follow safety protocol when the envelope containing the fentanyl was sent to the elections office. 

Spokane County Auditor Vikki Dalton told NonStop Local that the areas in which elections workers continued operations were separate from the room in which the envelope was found, and that the quarantine of individuals who came into contact with the powder was overseen by law enforcement. 

HB 1241 is now awaiting the governor’s signature and is expected to become law in the coming weeks.