I-25 and the Courthouse Two-Step

So the supporters of fair elections have turned in over 74,000 signatures, a comfortable margin over the 54,732 valid signatures needed to ensure I-25's place on the November ballot. We voters earned the right to decide for ourselves whether we want to directly elect our Elections Director. But what exactly are the next steps? The process is surprisingly bizarre and confusing, so read the whole thing.

First, the Council Clerk has to review the petitions for proper form (which could take a few more weeks) and reject any improper ones. Second, the Elections office validates the signatures (I leave it as an exercise to the reader to identify the conflict of interest). It remains to be seen whether the Elections office follows normal practices, and validates the intiative on the basis of a legally-defined statistical sample, or if it chooses to run down the clock at taxpayer expense and examine every signature until it gets to the qualification threshhold.

Third, assuming the initiative makes it out of the Elections office, it's up to the County Council to decide, by September 21, whether the voters vote on I-25 only once, or whether we have to vote on it twice. Seriously.

With most initiatives that submit the required number of signatures, the question goes directly to the voters. But this initiative is to amend the King County Charter, which can only be amended when the Council places a Charter change measure before the voters at a general election. [See Charter, Article 8, Section 800]. So when the Council discussed the Elections Director issue last year, it could have simply voted to put the Charter change question to create the separately elected office on the November 2006 ballot. And the voters could have decided this issue last year. (But then Bob Ferguson buckled under partisan pressure, betrayed the voters and weaseled out of the deal, motivating I-25).

The citizens can't directly amend the Charter through initiative, but the citizens can force the Charter change onto the ballot indirectly by filing an initiative for an Ordinance that would require the Council to place Charter change question on the ballot. As with any qualified initiative to propose an Ordinance, the Council has 3 options [See Charter Article 2, Section 230.50] -- (1) enact the Ordinance, i.e. place the Charter change question (whether to create the elected office of Elections Director) on the November 2007 ballot. (2) reject the Ordinance, in which case November 2007 ballot would include the question whether the Council shall be required to place the Charter change question on the November 2008 ballot. (i.e. make the voters vote on I-25 twice) Option (3) is a variant on (2), where the Council would also place an alternative measure on the November 2007 ballot.

This process was tested for the first (and as yet only time) in 2003-2004 when the King County Corrections Guild filed the initiative to shrink the Council from 13 to 9. It took a State Supreme Court case, NORM MALENG VS KING COUNTY CORRECTIONS GUILD for the process to be settled. By the time the Supreme Court had ruled, September 25, 2003, it was too late for any new measures to be added to the November 2003 ballot. But the County Council voted promptly to place the downsizing charter change directly on the next general election (November 2004) ballot , and not make the voters vote twice, even though most of the Councilmembers were personally opposed to the downsizing and had a vested interest in delaying the vote. In the words of Councilman Larry Phillips:

"We are being responsive and responsible ... We are adopting it in its entirety, and we are doing exactly what the initiative calls for."

We know that the Council Democrats have previously opposed the idea of letting the voters elect the Elections Director (except for Ferguson, who likes the idea, but chose last year to put his party before his conscience and his constituents). But it remains to be seen whether they'll be responsive and responsible and let the voters decide the issue with one vote, or if they want to drag it out and make us vote twice. I'd personally prefer that we decide the question once and for all this year, so the voter's choice of Elections Director (whoever that might be) has the mandate of legitimacy to run the 2008 elections.

On the other hand, I can see some advantages in dragging this out for another year. It'll be more work for me, but I'll have more time to dig up interesting and embarrassing documents through public record searches, and more time to obtain a legal judgment against King County Elections for public records violations and/or illegal vote counting, etc.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at July 09, 2007 01:37 PM | Email This