It’s Tim Eyman ver­sus Kim Wyman!

The dis­graced ini­tia­tive pro­mot­er has made Wash­ing­ton’s Sec­re­tary of State the tar­get of his lat­est cam­paign of online harass­ment after Wyman’s office removed Eyman’s Ref­er­en­dum 80 fil­ing from sos.wa.gov and replaced it with a mes­sage say­ing it and six oth­er iden­ti­cal ref­er­en­da filed by Eyman were “inval­i­dat­ed”.

Ref­er­en­dum 80 was an attempt to over­turn the new salary sched­ule for leg­is­la­tors and statewide elect­ed offi­cials approved by the Wash­ing­ton Cit­i­zens’ Com­mis­sion on Salaries for Elect­ed Offi­cials. Eyman filed it back on Feb­ru­ary 6th, 2019 and pro­ceed­ed to launch a sig­na­ture dri­ve for it short­ly thereafter.

How­ev­er, sub­se­quent to the fil­ing of Ref­er­en­dum 80, it was dis­cov­ered that there was an error in the text of the salary sched­ule the Com­mis­sion had approved (an incor­rect date had been includ­ed in the text).

The Code Revis­er fixed the error on Feb­ru­ary 27th, 2019, but Eyman neglect­ed to file a brand new ref­er­en­dum against the cor­rect­ed salary sched­ule, fig­ur­ing Ref­er­en­dum 80 was still a valid bal­lot measure.

The mes­sage on the Sec­re­tary of State’s Ref­er­en­da page

But it isn’t, and Wyman’s office has appar­ent­ly now advised Eyman that it won’t accept any peti­tions for Ref­er­en­dum 80. Eyman claimed that when he inquired about the valid­i­ty of R‑80, he was told: “The Commission’s refil­ing inval­i­dat­ed these ref­er­en­da and we are unable to accept signed peti­tion sheets for them.”

Nat­u­ral­ly, that response left Eyman spit­ting mad. He’s ask­ing his fol­low­ers to bar­rage Wyman with emails, phone calls, and texts, includ­ing at her pri­vate (non-offi­cial) email address and her per­son­al (non-offi­cial) tele­phone numbers.

Eyman wants Wyman to reverse course and agree to accept peti­tions for Ref­er­en­dum 80 (pre­sum­ing he gets enough signatures).

How­ev­er, if Wyman won’t com­mit to accept­ing the R‑80 peti­tions, Eyman said he’ll pull the plug on his sig­na­ture dri­ve. From his April 10th email:

“[I]f the Sec­re­tary of State isn’t going to accept them [the peti­tions], then it’s not fair for all our sup­port­ers to con­tin­ue to col­lect sig­na­tures. There­fore, we need an answer from her right away. If she says she’ll accept them, we’ll keep work­ing on it. But if she says she won’t, then our sup­port­ers should­n’t con­tin­ue to col­lect sig­na­tures for a mea­sure the Sec­re­tary of State refus­es to process.”

Wyman does­n’t actu­al­ly have a choice in this mat­ter. She can’t accept peti­tions for Ref­er­en­dum 80 because the under­ly­ing salary sched­ule does­n’t exist any­more… and there­fore, by exten­sion, Ref­er­en­dum 80 does­n’t exist any­more either.

Eyman — who con­sid­ers him­self a bal­lot mea­sure expert and is some­times incor­rect­ly labeled an “ini­tia­tive guru” by reporters — should have real­ized that the with­draw­al and repub­li­ca­tion of the salary sched­ule by the Com­mis­sion would auto­mat­i­cal­ly neces­si­tate the need for a brand new referendum.

Instead, Eyman made a faulty assump­tion based on the out­come of lit­i­ga­tion sur­round­ing Ini­tia­tive 1639 (gun respon­si­bil­i­ty) last year. By his own admis­sion, Eyman fig­ured that since the I‑1639 peti­tions were processed and accept­ed by the Sec­re­tary of State’s office despite print­ing defects, he did­n’t need to start over.

But what Eyman failed to appre­ci­ate is that ini­tia­tives and ref­er­en­da are very dif­fer­ent. In the case of Ini­tia­tive 1639, the prob­lem was spe­cif­ic to the peti­tions; the text had not been cor­rect­ly trans­ferred onto them. There was no issue with the bal­lot mea­sure itself. The ques­tion was whether the mea­sure’s peti­tions could be accept­ed in spite of the peti­tion design and print job hav­ing been botched.

The Supreme Court ulti­mate­ly decid­ed that the peti­tions should­n’t be thrown out.

Here we have essen­tial­ly the reverse sit­u­a­tion. It may be that as Tim Eyman claims, he “strict­ly fol­lowed all statu­to­ry and con­sti­tu­tion­al require­ments” when print­ing up peti­tions for Ref­er­en­dum 80. But whether he did or did­n’t is irrel­e­vant, because Ref­er­en­dum 80 was a ref­er­en­dum, not an initiative.

Here, the peti­tions aren’t the prob­lem… the mea­sure itself is the problem.

Unlike an ini­tia­tive, a ref­er­en­dum is a vote on an action that has already been tak­en — usu­al­ly a bill passed by the Leg­is­la­ture, but in the case of Ref­er­en­dum 80, a salary sched­ule approved by a con­sti­tu­tion­al­ly-man­dat­ed cit­i­zens’ commission.

Were Ref­er­en­dum 80 to actu­al­ly appear on the bal­lot, vot­ers would be con­sid­er­ing whether to approve or reject some­thing that no longer exists. And that makes no sense. The cor­rect­ed salary sched­ule is the only salary sched­ule that vot­ers could poten­tial­ly over­turn. For that cor­rect­ed salary sched­ule to be sub­ject­ed to a vote, a ref­er­en­dum would need to be filed against it. That has yet to happen.

As usu­al, Eyman has only him­self to blame. He made a bad assump­tion and now it appears he’s lost what­ev­er chance he had of forc­ing a vote on the new salary sched­ule approved by the Com­mis­sion. Eyman’s odds to begin with were bad, since he lacked the funds to hire paid peti­tion­ers and was try­ing to qual­i­fy Ref­er­en­dum 80 exclu­sive­ly with vol­un­teer labor sup­plied by his followers.

Eyman could still attempt to start over, but it would in all like­li­hood be futile.

The Con­sti­tu­tion allots only a three month win­dow for ref­er­en­dum cam­paigns, and the clock on the cor­rect­ed salary sched­ule has been tick­ing since Feb­ru­ary 27th. To qual­i­fy a new ref­er­en­dum, Eyman would need to gath­er about 164,264 sig­na­tures in the span of about a month, or approx­i­mate­ly 32,853 sig­na­tures per week.

The only way he could man­age that is with paid petitioners.

With Ref­er­en­dum 80 kaput, it appears we can add a new entry to Tim Eyman’s Fail­ure Chart. R‑80 is the eleventh Eyman mea­sure that went to the sig­na­ture gath­er­ing stage, but implod­ed before it could qual­i­fy for the ballot.