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.