When Washington became a state in 1889, the constitution required that all property be taxed at a uniform rate. In 1933, by a single vote, the state Supreme Court ruled in Culliton v. Chase that income counts as property. That one sentence is the reason Washington has no graduated income tax, and it has held for ninety years against every attempt to get around it.
In March 2026 the legislature passed ESSB 6346, a 9.9% tax on adjusted gross income over $1 million, effective in 2028. It is labeled an excise on "the receipt of income," which is a near-synonym for the 1936 statute the court already struck down in Jensen v. Henneford. The law is now drawing the constitutional challenge everyone expected. Whether it survives comes down to one question reaching one court: does Culliton still hold?
The legislators who wrote the bill said the quiet part in writing. Senate Majority Leader Jamie Pedersen wrote in an August 2025 email that he wanted "to force the Washington Supreme Court to reconsider its caselaw that considers income to be property," and later asked the Solicitor General for the language that would "give us the best shot to have Culliton overruled." The tax is the vehicle. Overturning the 1933 rule is the destination. For the full paper trail on the agency that would collect it, see our brief on the Department of Revenue. For the running candidate-by-candidate research that anchors this piece, see culliton2026.org, the independent project tracking every justice and challenger on the November ballot.
Culliton is not a standalone ruling. It is the keystone brick in a wall built from eight rulings, amendments, and statutes between 1908 and 2026. Each one stacked on the last.
A graduated income tax needs five votes at the Supreme Court to survive. Culliton needs five votes to be formally overturned. So the entire fight reduces to a vote count on a nine-member court. Culliton2026.org, an independent and nonpartisan project that read each candidate's public record, currently reads the court at seven to two against the rule. Only two sitting justices, Chief Justice Debra Stephens and Sheryl Gordon McCloud, are read as likely to keep it.
5 of 9 Supreme Court seats are on the 2026 ballot
16 candidates running across those five seats
7 to 2 how the court reads today, against Culliton
5 votes needed to keep Culliton and defeat the income tax
3 seats that have to flip to get there
Source: culliton2026.org candidate analysis, May 2026; Ballotpedia candidate filings
Four of the nine seats are not on the ballot and set the floor: Mungia, Whitener, and González read as likely to scrap the rule, Gordon McCloud as likely to keep it. That leaves the election to do the rest of the work. To move the count from two votes for the rule to five, three of the contested seats have to land with judges who would keep Culliton intact.
For each candidate, Culliton2026 read four things from the public record: who put them on their current bench, what they did before, how they describe their own approach, and what they have actually said or written about Article VII. The reads below are theirs, not ours. The candidates worth backing, one per seat, are highlighted.
| Candidate | Background | The read on Culliton |
|---|---|---|
| Position 1 · Yu seat · special election | ||
| Colleen Melody (sitting) | Career civil rights lawyer, Ferguson appointee | Scrap |
| Laura Christensen Colberg | Family law attorney, runs as independent | Not enough |
| Scott Edwards | Tax lawyer, Ballard Spahr, fights the DOR for taxpayers | Keep |
| Position 3 · Montoya-Lewis seat · open | ||
| David Stevens | Mason County Superior Court judge, textualist, WA GOP endorsed | Keep |
| J. Michael Diaz | Court of Appeals judge, former federal prosecutor, Inslee appointee | Leans scrap |
| Jaime Hawk | King County judge, ACLU and public defender background | Likely scrap |
| Position 4 · Charles Johnson seat · open | ||
| Ian Birk | Court of Appeals judge, plaintiff-side background, progressive slate | Leans scrap |
| Sean O'Donnell | King County judge, career prosecutor, cross-partisan endorsements | Not enough |
| Position 5 · Madsen seat · special election | ||
| Theo Angelis (sitting) | Long-time appellate lawyer, Ferguson appointee | Leans scrap |
| David Larson | Federal Way Municipal Court judge, textualist, WA GOP endorsed | Keep |
| Greg Miller | Appellate lawyer, 40+ years at the bar, no judicial record | Not enough |
| Sharonda Amamilo | Thurston County judge, former public defender | Not enough |
| Position 7 · Chief Justice | ||
| Debra Stephens (sitting) | Chief Justice, wrote the Quinn opinion and declined to revisit Culliton | Keep |
| Todd Bloom | Tax attorney and CPA, UW LL.M. in taxation, WSBA Board of Governors | Likely keep |
| David Shelvey | Solo practitioner, no active campaign | Not enough |
| Karim Merchant | Criminal defense attorney, no record on tax | Not enough |
Reads sourced from culliton2026.org. They are descriptions of the public record, not predictions of how any judge will rule.
Read the table by the math and a slate falls out of it. Five names, one per seat, easy to remember by their initials: Bloom, O'Donnell, Larson, Edwards, Stevens. But the count does not require all five. Three of these seats currently read as scrap votes, and flipping those three is the whole game.
Scott Edwards in Position 1 replaces a sitting justice who reads as a scrap vote. A tax lawyer who has spent his career fighting the Department of Revenue is not going to dismantle the rule that limits it. David Stevens in Position 3 is an open seat, and the alternatives are a former federal prosecutor and a public defender drawing the most income-tax-aligned endorsement list in the field. David Larson in Position 5 replaces another sitting justice who leans toward scrapping the rule. Those three seats move the count from two votes for Culliton to five. That is the majority. The wall holds and the income tax falls.
Edwards (Pos 1). Flips a sitting scrap vote. Keep.
Stevens (Pos 3). Open seat against two scrap-leaning judges. Keep.
Larson (Pos 5). Flips a sitting scrap-leaning vote. Keep.
Three flips. Two becomes five. The rule survives.
Sean O'Donnell in Position 4 is the insurance. His record reads as not enough to call, which makes the open seat the one to press for a clearer answer before November. Todd Bloom in Position 7 does not change the arithmetic, because the sitting Chief Justice already reads as a keep vote, but he locks the seat for the rule no matter how the chief race breaks.
Supreme Court races sit at the bottom of the ballot. Most people skip them or vote for whoever is already there. The result is that the rules deciding how an entire state collects revenue swing on tiny turnout, decided by voters who never knew the question was in front of them. The legislature understood that when it wrote a tax designed to force the question. The other side is counting on the bottom of the ballot staying empty.
That is the opening. A graduated income tax in Washington has been blocked for ninety years by one sentence and a one-vote majority. The same one-vote margin is on the ballot now, spread across five races almost nobody is watching. Three of them decide whether the wall stands.
The Stamp Act crisis was not solved by individual colonists complaining in their own taverns. It was solved when standing committees in Boston, Providence, New York, and Philadelphia started writing each other every week. By the time the British understood what was happening, the colonies had already agreed on a shared response. The towns had not just learned what was going on. They had learned to act together. That is the model Burnham Civic is using to rally Washington behind the five-seat slate.
The plan is a network of named correspondents in towns across the state, east and west of the Cascades, urban and rural, whose job between now and November is to make sure their neighbors know that five Supreme Court seats are on the ballot, that three of them decide whether Washington has an income tax, and that the slate to keep the Culliton rule intact is Bloom, O'Donnell, Larson, Edwards, Stevens. We point everyone first to culliton2026.org for the running candidate research.
The mechanism is simple. Each correspondent receives a short weekly dispatch with the latest from culliton2026.org: candidate updates, endorsement movements, polling reads, and a printable sample ballot listing the five names. The correspondent prints the sample ballot and hands it out at his church, his Rotary, his chamber of commerce, his county precinct meeting, his neighborhood listserv. Five names. One sheet of paper. Distributed by people their neighbors actually know. That is how judicial races at the bottom of the ballot get won, and it is the only way to beat the structural turnout problem the legislature is counting on.
The Five. Bloom, O'Donnell, Larson, Edwards, Stevens.
The Research. culliton2026.org
The Network. Committee of Correspondence for Washington
The Ask. If you want to be your town's correspondent, write us at operations@burnhamcivic.org. There is exactly one job: print the sample ballot, hand it out, and tell us how many you handed out.
Five names on the bottom of a long ballot, in races almost nobody is watching, decide whether Washington has an income tax for the next generation. The full candidate research lives at culliton2026.org. The network being built to rally turnout for the slate is the Committee of Correspondence for Washington. The collection apparatus waiting on the other side of the vote is the Washington Department of Revenue. Three doors. Same fight.