The Sunday Observer: Another year without direct democracy

After drug decriminalization petition drive crashes, no initiative turned in signatures

Friday marked the deadline to turn in signatures to put a ballot initiative before Washington voters in November. That’s notable because, for the third year in a row, nobody backed a truckload of signed initiative petitions up to the Secretary of State’s office.

The last initiative standing, a bid to decriminalize most illegal drug use, had quietly folded its signature drive just before the holiday weekend, after spending a great deal of money to gather a comparatively small number of signatures. It was kind of shocking because the measure was backed by the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington, which has access to some of the deepest wallets on the left. We’ll get back to that in a bit.

We’re frankly kind of sad about this situation. The Observer’s central interest is tracking the influence of money in politics, and the ballot initiative is the biggest gun in that arsenal at the state level. Who doesn’t like dueling $20 million campaigns full of mendacious claims, cherry-picked stats, menacing voice-overs, and actresses pretending to be concerned mothers? We haven’t had a really good ballot fight since we launched this thing in 2020. (There is an interesting initiative headed for the municipal ballot in Seattle. We’ll have something to say about that this week.)

They’ll be less of this action on your ballot in November

Some folks, particularly people who have actual seats in the Legislature, are no doubt happy to see that section of the ballot empty. Many lawmakers despise the process because it frequently saddles them with half-baked ideas, unfunded mandates, unsustainable tax cuts, and self-interested policy changes jammed through by sheer political force generated by giant sacks of cash money.¹

On the other hand, without the ballot initiative, Washington might not have legal weed, one of the nation’s highest minimum wages, cheap car tabs², and liquor stores that are open when an adult might run out of whiskey.³ All of those things had consequences⁴ of various kinds, but they’re unquestionably popular ideas that the Legislature balked at. On a more serious note, the state might not have legal abortion, but the voters handled that one twice, in 1970 and 1991.

The short answer on why nobody’s going to the statewide ballot this year is that signature-gathering has gotten brutally expensive. COVID-related restrictions and an overall labor shortage were expected to drive up costs for petitioning. But a boom in initiative politics in California and elsewhere poured gasoline on that problem and tossed a match over its shoulder on the way out. That was a big factor in the shelving of the capital gains tax repeal initiative, which never went out for signatures at all.

That gets us back to the demise of Initiative 1922, the aforementioned drug decriminalization measure. We were curious why the sponsors would walk away so close to the deadline, and with so much money already spent. The campaign wouldn’t elaborate on its statement, which is interesting reading if you’re a student of putting lipstick⁵ on pigs. Luckily, we’re not dependent on the people who get paid not to give us the straight dope. So we called some folks in the know.