On February 29, the Washington State Senate Government Operations & Elections Committee passed HB 1534. That is the bill that switches Washington state to the petition system, as opposed to the venerable old Washington habit of counting heads at nominating conventions. The Senate Committee also added an emergency clause, so the bill takes effect immediately if it passes.
emergency clause
Thanks! I corrected it. Since I’m a Californian, and the California term is “urgency clause”, I just knee-jerk used the California term instead of the Washington state term.
Richard,
Do we know when this bill will come to a vote in the Senate? And what is the new timeframe for petitioning?
Under the bill, people can start petitioning as early as they wish. Petitions for president are due in August. Petitions for other office are due in May, although that may have been amended to June.
Richard,
And the signatures will still only be 1,000 signatures?
I suspect that it will not pass. The close of the session is next Friday. There is a deadline for passing legislation that originated in the other House by today. It was passed through the Senate Rules committee yesterday, and is now on a calendar with 129 other bills. So far today, the Senate has taken up 20 bills. It is not clear what the order is – but I suspect that it helps to have a strong advocate who wants _their_ legislation passed this session. I think that HB 1534 was put forward as a favor to the SoS.
Since the senate committee amended the bill, it would still have to be re-passed by the House. (it may be that the Senate has to formally adopt the committee amendments, in which case they could reject the amendments – but that includes the emergency clause – which would make passage this session meaningless).
The committee amendments did move the filing deadline to June.
On Friday, the Senate made it through 59 of the 129 bills on the calendar, but not to HB 1534. The Senate has scheduled a session for Saturday. I don’t know whether that will be used to take action on more of the bills or to start considering bills where the House and Senate passed different versions.
HB 1534 is now in the Senate Rules “X File” which is where bills are placed so that they don’t clutter up the calendars of bills that might still receive consideration.