Initiative reform takes a leap forward in Washington thanks to Secretary Steve Hobbs

Effec­tive tomor­row, new mea­sures will begin rolling out to com­bat abuse of the ini­tia­tive and ref­er­en­dum process in Wash­ing­ton State, includ­ing the long­stand­ing prac­tice of bal­lot title shop­ping, Sec­re­tary of State Steve Hobbs’ office announced today. The long over­due reforms, which our team at NPI urged the office to adopt through its rule­mak­ing process, con­sist of an increase in the fil­ing fee from five dol­lars to $156, the index­ing of the fil­ing fee to infla­tion going for­ward, and the use of a part­ly ran­dom­ized string of num­bers to clas­si­fy initiatives.

NPI has for years called for the ini­tia­tive fil­ing fee to be increased to ensure that those who want to go shop­ping for a bal­lot title they like are required to pay more of the costs borne by the Sec­re­tary of State, Code Revis­er, and Attor­ney Gen­er­al’s offices in pro­cess­ing the fil­ings. Now that’s final­ly happening.

“The fee has remained sta­t­ic for more than a cen­tu­ry, despite infla­tion,” not­ed a news release issued by Hobbs’ com­mu­ni­ca­tions team. “In 1912, vot­ers approved Amend­ment 7 of the Wash­ing­ton State Con­sti­tu­tion to cre­ate the abil­i­ty to file ini­tia­tives and ref­er­en­da, start­ing in 1913. That year, the fil­ing fee was set at $5 to mir­ror con­tem­po­ra­ne­ous state fil­ing costs. At that time, aver­aged $3,500, a gal­lon of milk was around 35 cents, and movie tick­ets were 7 cents. The change index­es the fil­ing fees for ini­tia­tives and ref­er­en­da to the mod­ern equiv­a­lent of $5 in 1913, using U.S. Bureau of Labor Sta­tis­tics val­u­a­tion, and ensures that annu­al review and adjust­ment will keep the rel­a­tive val­ue current.”

In Jan­u­ary of 2013, we made an almost iden­ti­cal point in a state­ment released through our Per­ma­nent Defense project. Here’s an excerpt:

In those days, five dol­lars went a lot fur­ther than it does now. In fact, in 1914, the first year that ini­tia­tives appeared on Washington’s bal­lot, it cost about $117.23 to file an ini­tia­tive… in 2013 dol­lars.

So why does it only cost $5 today? The fil­ing fee hasn’t been updat­ed to keep up with infla­tion, let alone cov­er the true costs of fil­ing an ini­tia­tive or a referendum.

Ten years lat­er, Sec­re­tary Steve Hobbs answered the call and insti­gat­ed work on new rules to mod­ern­ize the fil­ing fee. Sum­ma­riz­ing that work today, Hobbs said:  “This over­due adjust­ment rec­og­nizes the real­i­ty of infla­tion on cost struc­tures uni­ver­sal­ly. The expens­es gen­er­at­ed in mul­ti­ple state agen­cies for pro­cess­ing each and every fil­ing of a poten­tial bal­lot mea­sure are not what they used to be in 1913, and our fee struc­ture must reflect that.”

The old fee of $5 will remain in place for ini­tia­tives to the peo­ple and for ref­er­en­da for a lit­tle while longer instead of sud­den­ly going up mid­way through fil­ing sea­son. But for ini­tia­tives to the 2025 Leg­is­la­ture, the fee will be $156, effec­tive tomor­row. That’s when fil­ing for those mea­sures begins this year.

So, if Wash­ing­ton State Repub­li­can Par­ty Chair Jim Walsh wants to go bal­lot title shop­ping for anoth­er slate of ini­tia­tives, he can — but it’ll cost him and his megadonor Bri­an Hey­wood a tidy sum. For con­text, Walsh filed six­ty-nine ini­tia­tives to the Leg­is­la­ture last year, which cost him a mere $345 for the lot.

Most of the six­ty-nine Walsh ini­tia­tives were var­i­ous iter­a­tions of each of the “Let’s Go Wash­ing­ton” mea­sures that Hey­wood sub­se­quent­ly ponied up fund­ing to qual­i­fy to the 2024 Leg­is­la­ture. Hey­wood and Walsh picked six of the six­ty-nine to run sig­na­ture dri­ves for. The oth­er six­ty-three ini­tia­tives were not pursued.

If Walsh wants to go bal­lot title shop­ping again this year, he’d have to pay $10,764 in fil­ing fees to cov­er the costs for pro­cess­ing six­ty-nine initiatives.

Walsh did not pio­neer the bal­lot title shop­ping game… it’s an oldie. Its chief prac­ti­tion­er for years was his bud­dy Tim Eyman, who used to be in the busi­ness of qual­i­fy­ing destruc­tive, decep­tive­ly word­ed ini­tia­tives to the bal­lot every year. For well over a decade, Eyman would waste our tax dol­lars by fil­ing zil­lions of drafts of ini­tia­tives that he had no inten­tion of actu­al­ly cir­cu­lat­ing sig­na­tures for to try to coax bal­lot titles of his lik­ing out of the Attor­ney Gen­er­al’s office.

Hobbs’ office did not men­tion Eyman by name in today’s announce­ment, but did allude to him when describ­ing the waste that his activ­i­ties result­ed in.

“From 1912 to 2024, the Office of the Sec­re­tary of State received 1,825 fil­ings for Ini­tia­tives to the Peo­ple or Ini­tia­tives to the Leg­is­la­ture. More than 60% of those fil­ings were since the year 2000. In 2022, 121 ini­tia­tives were filed; two peo­ple sub­mit­ted 61% of that total. Each sub­mit­ted ini­tia­tive and ref­er­en­dum must be reviewed and processed by elec­tions staff of the Office of the Sec­re­tary of State, as well as the Attor­ney General’s office and the state Code Reviser.”

“The par­tic­i­pa­to­ry democ­ra­cy of fil­ing bal­lot mea­sures is an impor­tant facet of our state government’s struc­ture, but keep­ing the fee arti­fi­cial­ly low has prob­lem­at­ic rip­ple effects,” Hobbs observed. “Many more bal­lot mea­sures are filed now and nev­er seri­ous­ly pur­sued. The out­dat­ed fee struc­ture may have made that a low-cost exer­cise for the fil­ers. At the same time, receiv­ing hun­dreds of fil­ings that don’t cov­er their own costs has dri­ven gov­ern­ment expens­es upward.”

Hobbs’ office is also insti­tut­ing a new num­ber­ing scheme for ini­tia­tives. With the new rules, ini­tia­tives will have a cal­en­dar-based pre­fix, fol­lowed by a ran­dom string of num­bers. That will make it impos­si­ble to file a batch of ini­tia­tives with the hope of get­ting a par­tic­u­lar num­ber assigned to one of the batch — anoth­er game that Eyman used to play back when his ini­tia­tive fac­to­ry was active.

For ref­er­en­da, sequen­tial num­ber­ing will con­tin­ue to be used.

The new sys­tem is as follows:

• The series for ini­tia­tives to the leg­is­la­ture shall be eight char­ac­ters in length, com­menc­ing with the let­ters IL, fol­lowed by the last two dig­its of the cal­en­dar year in which the ini­tia­tive to the leg­is­la­ture will be heard by the leg­is­la­ture and/or vot­ed upon by the peo­ple, a hyphen after the last two dig­its of the cal­en­dar year, fol­lowed by a unique, ran­dom­ly-select­ed three-dig­it number.
• The series for ini­tia­tives to the peo­ple shall be eight char­ac­ters in length, com­menc­ing with the let­ters IP, fol­lowed by the last two dig­its of the cal­en­dar year in which the ini­tia­tive to the peo­ple will be vot­ed upon by the peo­ple, a hyphen after the last two dig­its of the cal­en­dar year, fol­lowed by a unique, ran­dom­ly-select­ed three-dig­it number.
• The series for ref­er­en­dum mea­sures shall com­mence with the let­ters RM, fol­lowed by a unique num­ber which is the next on the list of ref­er­en­dum mea­sure num­bers sequentially.
• The series for ref­er­en­dum bills shall com­mence with the let­ters RB, fol­lowed by a unique num­ber which is the next on the list of ref­er­en­dum bill num­bers sequentially.

To give you an idea of how much the vol­ume of fil­ings has increased, here’s a run­down of which num­bers were in use for ini­tia­tives to the peo­ple at the begin­ning of each annu­al fil­ing peri­od, in four year incre­ments going back to 1996:

• 1996: Ini­tia­tive 655
• 2000: Ini­tia­tive 710
• 2004: Ini­tia­tive 860
• 2008: Ini­tia­tive 984
• 2012: Ini­tia­tive 1185
• 2016: Ini­tia­tive 1405
• 2020: Ini­tia­tive 1671
• 2024: Ini­tia­tive 2017

From 1996–2000, the num­ber of mea­sures that got an assigned num­ber was in the fifties. From 2020–2024, the num­ber of mea­sures that got an assigned num­ber was near­ly three hun­dred and fifty. And of those near­ly three hun­dred and fifty mea­sures, zero qual­i­fied for the bal­lot. That’s right: Zero. Vot­ers did not con­sid­er any statewide ini­tia­tives at all in 2020, 2021, 2022, or 2023.

Our team con­grat­u­lates Sec­re­tary Hobbs on this impor­tant mile­stone for ini­tia­tive reform. These new rules are a great sequel to the law that we cham­pi­oned two years ago requir­ing fis­cal impact dis­clo­sures for mea­sures that raise or low­er state rev­enue — a law that is wild­ly pop­u­lar with Wash­ing­ton State vot­ers — and last year’s law per­ma­nent­ly abol­ish­ing Tim Eyman’s waste­ful push polls.

In part­ner­ship with our elect­ed rep­re­sen­ta­tives, NPI is secur­ing an end to the waste, fraud, and abuse that took place dur­ing the Eyman error. The peo­ple’s ini­tia­tive, ref­er­en­dum, and recall pow­ers are sacred, and must be respect­ed. The laws and rules we’ve been work­ing to get adopt­ed will help ensure that they are. And we’re not done: there are more wor­thy changes in our pipeline of ini­tia­tive reforms that we’ll be work­ing to bring to fruition in the 2025 ses­sion and beyond.