If anyone was sitting around waiting for an update, you might have realized that this isn’t going anywhere this year. A month of so back I got a voice message from Rep. Hunt’s LA saying that there won’t be a bill this year.
I had suggested, probably too late, that it be attached to whatever initiative [...]
I’m a big fan of Rep. Sherry Appleton’s ban on paid-per-signature, but I also agree with the Seattle Times in their assesment of the bill:
Oregon already has such a ban. According to Michael Arno, who runs a California signature-gathering firm, the cost of getting a measure on Oregon’s ballot jumped from $175,000 to more than [...]
Rep. Sherry Appleton is at least talking the right talk about her paid-per-signature ban:
The whole issue behind Initiative and Referendum is it belongs to the people. The framers of the State Constitution envisioned citizens who were passionate about issues - either enacting legislation or repealing what the legislature had passed - to go out [...]
Looks like earlier when I was writing about Rep. Toby Nixon’s (who I make fun of on another topic here) bills to shrink the size of the initiative petition to a size that can be printed out on a home printer, I missed some things.
Two years before introducing HB 1014, he introduced HB 2742. [...]
If you just happened upon this blog, and you were wondering what the heck this is all about, and whether I’m actually dead and so is the idea, fear not. I’m not, its not.
I’ve been off working on other related projects, like this one that is meant to collect other great ideas like mine and [...]
While conservatives lean on big money sugar daddies like Michael Dunsmire and Martin Selig to bank roll their initiatives, progressives go to a different sort.
Meet Sam Garst of Olympia, the most prolific signature gatherer for I-937.
While conservatives can pay low wages to get feet on the streets collecting signatures at high traffic locations (Mariner games, [...]
There is something going on that I can’t figure out. On the local level, in Seattle and Bellingham, there are handful of progressive municipal initiative campaigns up and running. And, none of them are posting their initiative petitions online.
This is even more troubling because both Bellingham and Seattle (along with Spokane) allow printer sized (8.5 [...]
That the initiative process has been used in Washington in the past ten years to run rough-shod over state government's finances isn't evidence that the initiative system is broken, it is evidence that initiatives are the territory of the rich. Regular people, folks not like Michael Dunmire, don't get their ideas (or ideas they like) [...]
Cross posted at Olympia Time
Steve is correct when he reminds us that progressive's shouldn't hate the game, they should hate the player. It isn't the fault of the initiative process that it has been hijacked by right wing money makers like Eyman, it is our fault for giving the process over to them. A lot [...]
The meeting went well, I was early (way early) and so I scoured the first floor of the office building he's in for a nice bench so I could enjoy their nice public wifi. I ended up settling for an almost falling apart chair left outside a hearing room. No public seating in the John [...]
