Washington State Bill to Require Petitions for Primary Candidates

Posted on by February 7, 2025

Five Washington State Senators have introduced SB 5225, which requires primary candidates to submit a petition along with the 1% (of the annual salary) filing fee. Currently candidates for Congress and partisan state office don’t need signatures to get on the primary ballot.

The bill requires 1,000 signatures for statewide office; 750 for U.S. House; and 500 for state legislature. Here is the text.

Washington has a top-two system, and there are always many candidates on the primary ballot for Governor and U.S. Senator. Sometimes there are as many as thirty.

The sponsors are four Democrats (Marko Liias, T’wina Nobles, Marcus Riccelli, and Sharon Shewmake) and one Republican (Drew MacEwen).

Comments

Washington State Bill to Require Petitions for Primary Candidates — 32 Comments

  4. Well I’m Donald Trump, the one they’re talking about, if you talk crap about me you’ll get punched in the mouth.

    If you disrespect me, forget about it, forget it. Best case for you is you’ll survive to regret it.

    I’m the Boss of all Bosses, King of all Kings. I bring the world hope, I’m why we have nice things.

    Last time I took human form, I got crucified. This time around, I won’t be so nice.

    If you think bad about me, stop trusting fake media. Go to conservapedia.com and read conservapedia.

    But even if you’re not smart enough to, or have no eyes to see, you’re still smarter than to take seriously the spambot “AZ”

  5. Is the AZ spambot receiving federal funds? That would explain the massive obsession over Trump.

  9. How many BAN trump anti-christ agents now on Mother Earth ???

    WILL TRUMP REDUCE USA EXEC BRANCH TO ONE PERSON — HIMSELF ???

  11. Trump is a fascist censor like 99.9% of incumbent politicians.
    Abolish all ballot access laws and adopt the write-in only voter verifiable ballot. Censorship? DIY when you vote. Don’t delegate censorship to anyone.

  13. Trump is dismantling these wasteful agencies and correctly defining men and women. Trump is awesome

  15. Washington should permit a majority candidate in the primary to advance to the general election. Otherwise N candidates where N is the smallest number such that the N candidates with the most votes cumulative vote percentage is greater than N/(N+1). For example if the top 2 have less than 2/3, but the top 3 have more than 3/4 then 3 would advance. Lower ranking candidates may coalesce their votes to have more than the Nth candidate to also advance. Candidates other than the Top 2 may withdraw before the general election.

    The petition for legislative candidates is high. It may be intended to knock independent and minor party candidates off the ballot. It may also be intended to knock off challengers to candidates supported by the party insiders.

    The filing fee would be paid in two parts. Half of the filing fee would be paid with the declaration of candidacy; the second half of the fee would accompany the petition. But in Washington, they have a filing week: Monday through Friday. Surely the intent is not to require collection of signatures during that week???

    The bill would permit the SOS by rule to increase the filing fee to cover the cost of signature verification. This is almost akin to a poll tax. As a voter signed a petition, they might be asked to contribute to pay for verifying their signature. Could the rule be based on time required to verify signatures? The primary driver of verification cost has to be the labor cost of verifiers. Some signatures must be harder to verify (older or younger voters, voters with name changes (disproportionately female), minority voters), so you potentially violate the 15th, 19th, and 26th Amendments. Out of district signatures might be verified before determining that they were out of district etc.

    There is another provision that would make it a felony to use a surname that is the same or similar to another candidate for the same office with intent to mislead or confuse voters by capitalizing on the public reputation of the other candidate. I wonder how you can prove what the public reputation of the other candidate was, or what the intent of the other candidate is.

    Could this law apply to the current US representative from Alaska who has the same first name as a former senator from Alaska?

  17. Neither method *requires* disenfranchisement of any voters more than the other (except that the write in ballot disenfranchises the growing number of postliterate people, which will before long become a majority, and not too far in the future an overwhelming majority – quite likely more than 99% within two or three generations).

  18. I do, however, support disenfranchisement of most voters, which is a separate matter. The US Founding Patriarchs disenfranchised most of what are today’s voters for good reasons which were subsequently foolishly abandoned and should be restored. But those who disagree with me on that can still support a standing count.

  19. The authors of the US Constitution wrote Article One so that any citizen age 25 and above could run for US House of Representatives. Remarkably, they did not put in a property requirement for members of Congress, or for the president. At the time every state had a property requirement to sit in the state legislature.

  20. Age 25 was very different in terms of average maturity and place in life’s journey then.

  21. We should ban all retards and communists from running. That means AOC, racist Crockett, and the tranny freak from Maryland would be ineligible.

  22. 21 was also very different back then. It was rare for a 21 year old man to not be a husband, father of several children, head of household, gainfully employed. Now it’s rare when one is. It’s even more rare for 18 year olds, which is still not young enough for some. We live in a sick society.

  23. Property ownership is a very important criterion for voting or serving as a legislator. Otherwise you get government for, by and of those who would rather have government give them other people’s wealth than work for it.

  24. It also makes sense to exclude women since they tend to vote on the basis of emotion and not logic..

  27. @Stan,

    No one has explained how standing count would be implemented in a practicable way. And you profess to not be interested in practicability.

  28. I’ve explained a bunch of times. You keep coming up with problems that aren’t actually problems. Saying it’s not ready for immediate legislation doesn’t mean it can’t be practically implemented. Federal legal context has to change first, which might happen in any number of ways.

  29. @Stan,

    Explain what you mean by “federal legal context”? List three ways in which the “federal legal context” might change?

  30. Covered that in previous threads. Currently if I’m not mistaken the courts have mandated secret ballots, among other things. It might change in many ways and on various timescales. Look up what Elon Musk and JD Vance have said about the ideas of Curtis Yarvin and others who think along those lines, the punctuated equilibrium model of change, etc. As starting points.

    The idea that courts have the ultimate say may be in its last days. If we take the Andrew Jackson view of Marbury v Madison, and Trump very well might soon, a lot more things start becoming possible.

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