A bill in Washington state to make it more difficult for initiatives to get on the ballot has been killed by the House Rules Committee. It is HB 2601, and it had passed the House State Government Committee on February 5, and the House Appropriations Committee on February 7.
Currently, Washington state initiative petitions are valid, regardless of who collected the signatures. Circulators don’t even need to sign the sheets that they collected. HB 2601 would have required that each sheet be signed by the circulator. If the circulator is being paid, the circulator must have registered with the state, taken and passed a test, been issued “credentials” which includes a photo showing the circulator’s face, neck, and shoulders. No one could be “credentialed” to be a paid circulator who was a convicted sex offender, or who had been convicted of any crime in any state involving fraud, ID theft, or forgery in the last five years. Any paid circulator’s address would be a public record.
Major newspapers editorialized against the bill, and Paul Jacob (the nation’s leading activist to extend and protect the initiative process) toured the state, organizing opposition to the bill. Here is an op-ed against the bill that ran in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Paul Jacob? I would like to remind everyone he has been indicted for initiative fraud. They would have been better off with out him involved. He has a reputation for cheating circulators and not getting amendments on the ballot. I may disagree with the law he was arreated for but we still have to obey the laws! He claims to be for initiatives but he is really just for himself.
If I was an legislator and knew he was involved I would have voted for the law. Thank God they voted it down.
The indictment of Paul Jacob is a witch hunt conducted by a politically ambitious attorney general. It’s an outrage!
Bans on out-of-state circulators are sneaky, underhanded ways of killing the initiative process.
Yes on Term Limits v. Savage challenges Oklahoma’s ban on non-resident circulators and may well have consequences for other states with similar bans.
There is no law in Oklahoma that makes it a crime for anyone to hire people from outside the state to circulate a petition. There is only an Oklahoma law that makes it illegal for anyone out-of-state to actually circulate that petition. Furthermore, the Oklahoma Secretary of State’s office had told Paul that as long as the people he hired lived in Oklahoma for a few months, they could legally circulate a petition.