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For the fifth year in a row, Washington voters will not have a chance to enact a law in place of the Legislature. There will be no people’s initiatives on the top of the November ballot.
Voters also will not be asked whether they approve of a bill the Legislature passed. Despite efforts to overturn one of the session’s most controversial laws, there will be no referendum measures on the ballot, either.
Referendum 101, the one serious signature-gathering effort this year, was aimed at having voters reject Senate Bill 5599, which some feared would result in youth receiving certain health care like abortion or gender-affirming care without parental notification.
The campaign didn’t turn in signatures by the July 20 deadline. Sponsor Dawn Land told supporters on the campaign website they had gathered more than 157,000 signatures, which was shy of the minimum requirement of 176,226 signatures and well short of the cushion of an extra 20,000 or so above the minimum most campaigns seek to assure certification.
Land complained of signature gatherers facing “harassment, intimidation and threats.” In a July 18 letter to Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, political commentator Brandi Kruse said she witnessed that kind of activity on several occasions as a volunteer signature gatherer.
“Our democracy depends on all voters having their voices heard,” Kruse wrote, adding it was Hobbs’ “fundamental duty to protect the sanctity of our elections.”
Hobbs agreed in a response on July 20 that laws that protect the elections process “must be dutifully enforced” but noted his office doesn’t have the authority to investigate complaints or enforce criminal statutes. That’s up to local law enforcement.
On July 20, 56 legislative Republicans signed a separate letter to Hobbs and Attorney General Bob Ferguson, citing the incidents described by Kruse’s letter and asking Ferguson for an investigation.
A response to the GOP legislators’ letter is in the works, said Brionna Aho, a spokeswoman for Ferguson’s office.
Reports of harassment during the signature-gathering process have increased in recent years. There’s clearly a set of conflicting rights of political speech between supporters seeking to urge voters to sign and opponents urging them not to.
But intimidating people to keep them from signing or gathering like Kruse recounts shouldn’t be tolerated. Neither should harassing people into signing, as has been reported of some paid gatherers in the past.
By the numbers
The five-year hiatus in Washington voter initiatives, one of the most popular populist tools of both liberals and conservatives, is the longest in nearly a century. It’s also a record drought since initiatives became a yearly thing, not relegated to the even-numbered years in which Washington has no state general elections.
Some years, as many as a half-dozen initiatives filled the top of the state ballot, pushing down the names of would-be presidents, senators or governors.
Referendum measures are less common. The Legislature sometimes goes nearly a decade without passing a law that angers some group enough to file a petition, and about half the time they don’t find enough people similarly peeved to get sufficient signatures.
As in recent years, the lack of people’s initiatives on the ballot has not coincided with fewer petitions being filed. A total of 371 petitions — a near record for a five-year period — were filed since 2019, without a single one gathering the required signatures to make the ballot.
Of the 70 petitions filed this year, 63 were from initiative entrepreneur Tim Eyman. Of those, 26 were some form of tax limitation and 10 attempted to revive the issue that gave Eyman his start, a requirement to limit vehicle license tabs to $30.
By mid-March, Eyman abandoned his efforts to put a measure on this year’s ballot and switched several of his tax and tab limitation efforts to possible initiatives to the Legislature.
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