Competing views on what to do with the legally defective I-1029 petitions today from Dick Davis's syndicated column and the Seattle Times editorial page.
Quick background: I-1029, the local Service Employees International Union's initiative to require certification and more training of long-term care workers (and, one imagines, some how, some way, some day mint more SEIU members from which union dues can be extracted) was filed, numbered, and processed as an initiative to the people for the fall ballot. But the actual petitions prepared by SEIU, signed by voters, and turned in earlier this month uses the statutory formula for an initiative to the Legislature, a constitutionally distinct species of direct democracy.
Secretary of State Sam Reed, later aided by the Attorney General's office, has taken an Alfred E Neuman approach to the misstep. He's decided to process the initiative for the fall ballot, thus choosing to ignore the directive of the petitioners themselves and instead honor SEIU's presumed intent in filing the initiative. I-1029 opponents, the Community Care Coalition, have rightly called foul, and appear ready to seek a judicial remedy. Lastly, initiative metaphysician Tim Eyman has weighed in to propose a via media -- don't reject the petitions outright, and don't put the thing on the ballot, but rather effectuate the will of the petitioners as evidenced by the clear language of the petitions -- send the matter to the Legislature.
All of which Dick's piece nicely explores. And that is a stark contrast to the Times' effort, which it seems misunderstands or brushes aside the structure, function, and purpose of any petition to the government, the importance of the distinction between initiatives to the people vs. to the Legislature, the statutory formalities that initiative petitions must contain, and the nature of the error here. Calling the use of the statutory form for a petition to the Legislature a "minor mistake," the Times concludes the error "was not important enough to nullify 300,000 signatures."
But there's the rub. 300,000 (or more likely, 240-250,000 valid) signatures are on a petition to the Legislature regardless of how the sponsors filed the measure back in March. Reed's current trajectory ironically does nullify those 300,000 signatures because it takes an action contrary to their express directive. It honors SEIU's presumed intent as sponsor, excuses the union's apparent printing mishap, and assumes the voters were ignorant or mistaken in signing the petition.
Either way, handling I-1029 will involve tolerance for irregularity. If Reed is forced by court order to submit the initiative to the Legislature, that will be contrary to its sponsor's affidavit and the measure would bear a way-off serial number (were this correctly filed as an initiative to the Legislature, it would have likely been called I-409). But it seems to me those irregularities have less gravity than assuming voters didn't know, or didn't care, about the plain language of what they were signing, a position which effectively removes them from the constitutional equation and reduces them to mere cogs in a sponsor's signature-harvesting combine.
Davis, Eyman, and the Community Care Coalition have touched upon the better argument here.
