Washington state has many different ways to participate in the legislative process, including sending your sending your legislators comments about a bill. Here’s the instructions for how to do it using the web form on the legislature’s site, phone, or email.
Using the web form on the state legislature’s web site
Commenting on a bill on the state legislature’s web site is an easy way to let your legislators know your position on the bill and send any comments to one or all of your state legislatures. Here’s how:
- Find the comment page on the bill. Sometimes actions directly have the link — for example, here’s the page on SB 6002 (the Driver Privacy Act, regulating Flock and other ALPRs). If you don’t have the link, we have instructions below how to find it.
- Fill in your address and click Verify District
- Enter your contact information. Remember that any information you send to legislators is part of the public record. Many experienced activists use a separate email address for communiating with the state government, and the phone number is optional on this form.
- Select the legislators you want to sent it to. We usually suggest selecting all of them: if bills pass one chamber, they’ll go to the other chamber, so even if they’re not paying attention to the bill now they will be able to find your comments later.
- Choose your position — Support, Oppose, or Neutral. Sometimes this is a tricky choice; for example, if you’re saying that the current version of the bill isn’t good enough but you still think it’s important to pass the bill, support might make sense.
- Fill out the rest of the form and click on Send Comment.
Your comment doesn’t have to be fancy — something like “SB 6002 is an important bill to pass, but I am very concerned that the current version is not strong enough to protect immagrants” is fine.
Or, if there’s an action out on the bill, they may have a suggested script or talking points to use to write your own. If you’ve got a story related to the bill, that’s great to include. You can even just cut-and-paste the script if you’re pressed for time!
By phone
If you prefer to call, the legislative hotline at 1–800–562–6000 (TTY for Hearing Impaired 800.833.6388) also lets you get a message to all your legislators at once.
- Tell them the bill number you’re calling about (SB 6002) and your position (you support it but are very concerned it’s not strong enough and want to leave a comment).
- They’ll ask for your address, and then what you want to say about the bill.
The staffer has to type in whatever you say, so it’s fine to keep it simple — “Please concur and pass the Senate version of this bill.”. Or you can go into more detail, like the script above.
By email
Legislators are getting a lot of email right now so there is no guarantee they’ll read it, but they are at least likely to see the subject line — so it is very important to include all the information there so they know what you want them to do. Choose a subject line like
Strengthen SB 6002 to protect immigrants
Unfortunately, the legislature no longer publishes email addresses. Instead, legsialtors have a contact form on their page. If you’re not sure who your legislators are, start by looking up your district using the legislature’s District Finder. It’s easiest to send a single email to all three of your lawmakers, or you can mail each one individually.