Derek Sanders

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Who funds this seat

Campaign finance reported to the Public Disclosure Commission. The record and the PDC share no identifier, so this is a join — on surname, given name, chamber and district for a legislator, and on the office won and the county it was won in for everyone else. Only where one person fits.

By campaign

Largest reported contributors

Individual contributors, by stated employer

Private individuals are not named here unless their own public conduct already makes them a public figure; their giving appears aggregated by the employer they stated. The full itemised record is public at the PDC.

Colleagues who gave on the same day

Three or more people sharing an employer, giving to one of this member’s campaigns on a single date. Money arriving together is the pattern; a shared employer on its own is not. Across every campaign we hold, not just the most recent.

Employers behind more than one donor

Across the whole cycle rather than a single day. Weaker than the table above, and included because a slow accumulation from one workplace is still worth being able to see.

Spent independently, for and against · not their money

Money spent about this member by committees that are barred by law from coordinating with them. It is not their money, they cannot return it, and it is not in the total above. Spending for someone is not money from them, and the two sides are never subtracted from each other.

Sources WA PDC C-3 contribution reports · C-6 independent expenditure and electioneering communication reports · as of 2026-09-16 · filer SANDD–145 · key office won + county it was won in — refused where more than one person fits · note independent expenditures are joined on the PDC candidate id, not on a name; they are a separate ledger, never netted against each other and never added to the committee’s own total

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What this page will not compute

Each of these is a number a reader might reasonably expect. None of them follow from the records we hold, so we do not publish them.

What the money bought

Where a filing is matched we show what was raised and from whom. Connecting that to how the member voted would be a causal claim from two records that were never linked, and campaign money is not the only thing that moves a vote.

A complete funding career

Cycles are shown back to 2009. A member who served before that has earlier campaigns we do not hold, so the career total is a floor rather than a lifetime figure.

Employers we cannot see

The employer field is filled in by the donor and left blank more often than not, so the bundling table shows employers we can see rather than every one that exists.

Whether a difference was a broken promise

Where a stated position and a vote differ we show both records and say only that they differ. Why is not in either one — an amendment, a procedural vote, or a bill that changed under the member all produce the same pair.

A complete set of statements

Positions are found and cited one at a time by a person. An empty or short list means nobody has done that reading, not that a member has said little.

Advertising

Meta’s ad library and PDC independent expenditures targeting this member are both public and neither is loaded.

What a divergent vote means

We can say a member voted against their party’s majority on a given roll call. Whether that was principle, a local interest, a drafting objection or a trade is not in the record, and the count is not a measure of independence.

Committee influence

Chair and ranking-member roles decide which bills get heard. The roster gives membership without role, so every seat here looks alike.

A member’s response

The design reserves space for one. We have no process yet for soliciting or publishing it, so the section is absent rather than empty.

Cite this page

This is public-records reporting. Use it, and say where it came from.

“Derek Sanders,” WashingtonIndependents.org, data as of 2026-09-16, accessed 2026-09-19. https://washingtonindependents.org/official/derek-sanders/

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Our tables, figures and notes on this page are released under CC BY 4.0 — reuse them, including commercially, with attribution. The underlying records are public records of the State of Washington and were never ours to license.

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Where this page comes from

Every figure above is read from a primary source and rebuilt on a schedule. Nothing here is modelled or inferred; where a source is silent the page says so rather than filling the gap.

WA Legislature member roster

Name, party, district, chamber and contact details, per session served.

WA Legislature roll call service

Every recorded floor vote. Committee votes are recorded per committee rather than per member and are not included.

Party divergence

Derived, not published by the Legislature. For each roll call we take the majority position of the member’s own party and flag votes against it, counting only roll calls where that party had a clear majority.

WA Legislature legislation records

Prime sponsorship, and each bill’s outcome and hearing status. Co-sponsorship is not in the record we hold.

Public Disclosure Commission candidate filings

Contributions, expenditures, the largest reported contributors and their stated employers, for every cycle back to 2007. Matched on surname and given name plus chamber and district for a legislator, or the office won and the county it was won in for everyone else — never on name alone — and only published where one person fits. Across the record that resolves 1,938 of 13,879 officials over 3,548 cycles, with 45 refused as ambiguous; the rest say why they did not match.

Not loaded

Public statements, advertising, committee roles, and committee votes by member.