About us

We built WA People so that everyone in Washington can easily see the laws being made for them, and who is making them.

Thousands of bills are introduced in Olympia every two years. They touch rent and housing, schools, taxes, health care, public safety, jobs, the environment, and nearly every part of daily life. The information is public, but it's scattered across many pages and written in legislative shorthand. It's hard to follow unless following it is your job.

WA People puts it in one place and in plain language:

• Every bill, proposed, ongoing, and past, back to 1991, with a short summary of what it does.
• Who brought it: the prime sponsor and every co-sponsor.
• How every legislator voted, on every recorded vote, with dates.
• Who represents you, on a map of all 49 legislative districts.
• What the courts said: Washington Supreme Court decisions about laws and public policy.

We believe an informed public makes for better government. WA People is nonpartisan: it doesn't endorse candidates, parties, or positions, and it reports the official record as it is. It's free, has no ads and no tracking, and is built entirely with open-source software and public data. It updates itself every day.

See something wrong, or have an idea? Contact us. Corrections help everyone.

How it works

The rest of this page explains where the data comes from and how we organize it.

Where the data comes from

• Bills, sponsors, history and votes: the Washington State Legislature's public web services, the same data behind app.leg.wa.gov.
• Supreme Court decisions: CourtListener, the free legal archive run by the nonprofit Free Law Project. Full opinion text comes from the official PDFs published by the Washington Courts.

This is not an official government website. For anything that matters legally, check the official bill page or the opinion itself. Every page here links to its official source.

How bills are sorted

The Legislature reports a short status code for each bill, such as H Approps, S Rules X or C 209 L 25. WA People turns it into plain language and puts every bill into one of three groups:

• Proposed: prefiled, introduced, or sitting in a policy or fiscal committee.
• Ongoing: out of committee, on a floor calendar, passed one chamber, or passed by the Legislature and waiting for the Governor.
• Past: enacted (with its chapter in the session laws), vetoed, adopted, confirmed, or did not pass.

Whether a bill “passed the House” or “passed the Senate” comes from its recorded final-passage roll call. Washington's constitution (Article II, section 22) requires a recorded yea/nay vote on final passage. A bill that hasn't passed when the second year of a two-year session ends is listed as did not pass, together with how far it got (for example, “passed House, stalled in Senate”). Bill numbers restart every two years, so HB 1217 in 2025–26 and HB 1217 in 2023–24 are different bills.

Known gaps in the source data: the Legislature's services have no step-by-step bill history before 2001, though sponsors, final status and roll-call votes go back to 1991. A few later bills have incomplete history, and a handful of roll calls are missing or labeled inconsistently (for example “FP” for final passage, or a blank motion). A bill that became law or was vetoed is always counted as having passed both chambers, even when one chamber's roll call is missing.

Bill summaries

The short summary under each bill comes from the Legislature's own nonpartisan staff: the Bill Analyses and Bill Reports written for committee hearings and floor votes (or, for older sessions, bill digests). WA People uses the report on the version of the bill that advanced furthest, so an enacted bill's summary describes what became law. Each bill page links to the full report. Bills that never got a hearing have no staff report; for those the Legislature's one-line description is shown instead. Summaries are not written or edited by this site.

How Supreme Court cases are selected

A decision of the Washington Supreme Court (from 1991 on) is included when its text matches at least one of these searches. The matching passage is shown on every case so you can judge for yourself:

• Cites a specific bill: The opinion discusses a House or Senate bill by name.
  Search: "House Bill" OR "Senate Bill"
• Ballot initiative or referendum: The case involves a statewide initiative or referendum.
  Search: "Initiative Measure" OR "Initiative No." OR "initiative to the people" OR "initiative to the legislature" OR "Referendum Measure" OR "Referendum No." OR "Referendum Bill"
• Constitutionality of a law: The court considers whether a statute or ordinance is constitutional.
  Search: (unconstitutional OR "facially invalid" OR "facial challenge") AND (statute OR ordinance OR "Laws of" OR legislature)
• Legislative power & process: Single-subject and title rules, separation of powers, or veto power.
  Search: "single subject" OR "subject-in-title" OR "article II, section 19" OR "article II, section 37" OR "separation of powers" OR "veto power"

Attorney and judicial discipline cases are left out. When an opinion cites a session law (“Laws of 2021, ch. 196”), it is linked to the exact bill that became that chapter. When it names a bill with a year next to it (“ESSB 5096 … 2021”), it is linked by number and session. References without a year are listed but not linked, because the same bill number is reused every session.

Freshness

The current session and new court decisions are refreshed every morning. Past sessions don't change.

65,216 bills · 640 legislators · 53,554 roll calls · 0 court decisions across 18 sessions.

Open-source stack

PostgreSQL (data and full-text search), Python with FastAPI and Jinja2 (website), httpx and pypdf (data collection), all running in Docker. No tracking, no cookies, no ads.