Camden: State flush with filed initiatives; many won’t make ballot

Most topics had multiple initiatives filed in a process that is common — but not unique — to Eyman. Rather than concentrate on one ballot measure with well-crafted legal language, certain sponsors file multiple versions, hoping one will pass muster with state officials who must review the submissions and essentially dispense free legal advice.

Despite their unflagging initiative in filing ballot measures, “the dynamic trio” did not come up with a proposal for which they felt the need to spend significant time or money collecting signatures.

Supporters need not worry greatly, however.

Eyman, Fagan and Fagan are shifting their attention this year to an initiative to the Legislature, which is a process more active in the second half of the year, rather than an initiative to the people, which had to submit signatures by Friday. It’s called “We Love Our Cars,” a title it shares with nine of his initiatives to the people that were filed — and later withdrawn — after receiving official numbers.

Numbers rapidly growing

The state does not reuse ballot numbers; once issued, they are retired, even if the initiative never develops beyond the ruminations of an irate legislator or political gadfly. We are running through them at an ever-quickening pace.

Between 1914 and 1964, the first 50 years after the populist-progressives added ballot initiatives as a resident workaround for unresponsive lawmakers, 215 were filed, an average of about four a year. The numbers steadily increased in the 1980s and 1990s, but by the end of the century, the total number filed was still in the triple digits: 709.

Between 2000 and 2016, the numbered initiatives more than doubled, so that the final designation issued this year was 1542. In the 21st century, Washingtonians are filing an average of 49 initiatives to the people each year.

That hasn’t resulted in a corresponding increase in the number of initiatives collecting enough signatures to be on the ballot. Of the 137 that received numbers this year, only four sponsors bothered to turn in signatures by Friday’s deadline. All have a substantial cushion beyond the 246,372 valid signatures needed and will likely be on the ballot.

They will join the two initiatives to the Legislature already on the ballot because lawmakers ignored them, so the total falls one shy of the 1914-1964 record.

The people who gave the state the initiative process 102 years ago were wary of big business, big unions and big political machines. They probably never counted on initiatives becoming a business rather than a spontaneous uprising of public sentiment, an occupation for perennial sponsors or as a cash cow for companies charging to collect signatures.

While almost everything else has changed about the initiative process, one thing has not: Filing one costs $5, just as it did in 1914. Efforts to adjust it for inflation have brought howls of protest from the initiative industry. Perhaps the Legislature should consider a change that keeps the first initiative a sponsor files at $5, but doubles and redoubles the price for each successive initiative from that organization on the same topic.