OLYMPIA – Washington lawmakers, long irritated by Tim Eyman and other initiative purveyors, are considering a ban on per-signature payments to those clipboard-toting solicitors who sprout up every spring.
Other proposals include jacking up the filing fees for ballot initiatives and requiring solicitors to wear ID badges.
Eyman and his backers say it’s all about chilling the initiative process. Sponsors of the legislation vehemently deny that motive. They say they want to clean up the process and regulate some of the initiative factories that have sprung up.
Eyman, a Mukilteo watch salesman who has angered many lawmakers with his tax-revolt measures and his barbs at the legislative process, says the latest bills seem aimed at him. After a raucous Senate hearing Tuesday, he joked that he should have agreed to let lawmakers take him outside and beat him up if they’d just drop their attacks on the initiative process.
One lawmaker, Sen. Ken Jacobsen, D-Seattle, made a case for dumping the whole initiative and referendum process, saying it turns representative democracy on its head and lets voters mandate new spending or cut revenue without being responsible for the budget havoc.
But Sen. Darlene Fairley, D-Lake Forest Park, chairwoman of the Senate Governmental Operations and Elections Committee, quickly buried Jacobsen’s perennial bill and turned the panel’s attention to the tuneup measures.
The main change, which has drawn the support of the state’s chief elections officer, Secretary of State Sam Reed, would ban the practice of campaigns paying solicitors by the signature to collect voter names on petitions. They could still be paid by the hour.
Typically, initiative professionals pay $1 or more for each signature.
It takes about 225,000 valid signatures for an initiative campaign to win a ballot spot. In recent years, nearly all successful campaigns, including Eyman’s, have used paid signature collectors to augment volunteers. Courts have held that this is free speech and that states can’t ban it outright.
The prime sponsor of the proposal to ban per-signature payments, Sen. Adam Kline, D-Seattle, an attorney who heads the Senate Judiciary Committee, said paying people by the piece is an invitation to commit fraud.
But Eyman and other initiative sponsors said the ban would jack up the cost of qualifying for the ballot, since hourly employees could coast, rather than hustle to earn more by gathering more signatures. A good per-signature worker can earn $20 or $30 an hour easily, the committee was told.
Eyman said his public records request with Reed’s office showed no recent examples of fraud or forgery.
“Eight million signatures submitted over eight years, and zero verified forgeries or fraud,” he said.
The state already has laws against fraud and Reed’s office does random checks for validity, witnesses said.
And a ban in Oregon on paid signature gatherers has been “an abysmal failure,” more than tripling the cost to qualify for the ballot and slashing the number of successful initiatives, Eyman said.
The state Labor Council, Northwest Progressive Institute, initiative activist Steve Zemke and others endorsed Kline’s effort, calling it a friendly bill acceptable to those who cherish the process.
Bills by numbers
The ban on the initiative process is SJR8205. The ban on paying by the signature is SB5356. Filing fees would be increased under SB5392. Local ballot titles are addressed in SB5418. Signature gatherers would be required to wear identification under SB5181 and to sign petition pages under SB5182. Learn more at www.leg.wa.gov.
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