History
In 1897 State Representative L. E. Reeder of Ollalla introduced a
constitutional amendment for initiative and referendum that passed the
lower house by a 63 to 12 vote, but it failed in the state senate. Influential
in that partial victory was House Speaker Charles E. Cline of Olympia, who
became secretary of the state’s Direct Legislation League.
Another state legislator, George F. Cotterill of Seattle, had become
president of the League by 1900. By this time, however, Cline was no
longer House Speaker, and the I&R movement stagnated.
In 1907 the state’s organized labor and farm groups cooperated with
the Direct Legislation League in deluging the legislature with petitions
calling for statewide I&R. Soon after, the I&R bill introduced by State Rep.
Glenn N. Ranck of Vancouver passed the lower house 66 to 26, but the
state senate defeated it 25 to 15. An I&R supporter noted that “just two
forces” opposed I&R: “special privileged corporation interests and the
organized liquor traffic,” the latter because it feared voters would enact a
Prohibition initiative.
The state Federation of Labor, whose president was Charles Case, and
the state Grange, whose “master” (i.e., president) was C. B. Kegley,
formed a Joint Legislative Committee that finally got the I&R amendment
through both houses of the legislature in 1911. However, the version
passed by the legislature did not allow voters to initiate state constitutional
amendments, because certain state senators, with the active support of
Governor Hay, insisted that an amendment receive at least 60 percent of
all votes cast in a general election in order to pass. The pro-I&R committee
refused to accept this compromise, and over 70 years later, there is still no
provision for initiatives to amend the state constitution in Washington.
Voters ratified the legislature’s I&R bill by a five to two margin in 1912, and
in the same election, George Cotterill was elected mayor of Seattle.
The farmer-labor Joint Legislative Committee put the voters’ newly
established lawmaking powers to use immediately. They circulated
petitions to put seven initiatives on the 1914 ballot, of which five qualified,
though only one was approved by voters: a measure to abolish private
employment agencies. The intent behind this law was to stop the welldocumented
exploitation of unemployed workers, particularly
lumberjacks, by such agencies.
A statewide Prohibition initiative also passed in 1914, just as the liquor
interests had feared. The following year anti-initiative forces in the
legislature - which was “dominated by the whiskey, lumber, and fish
interests,” according to Grange Master Kegley - struck back by passing a
bill (deceptively titled “An Act to Facilitate the Operation of the Initiative
and Referendum”) that would have made it virtually impossible to get an
initiative on the ballot.
Progressive forces used the power of referendum to stop the bill from
going into effect. They quickly circulated petitions to block it until voters
could reject it in the November 1916 election (which they did, by a three
to one margin).
The legislature soon found a way to obstruct the referendum provision:
by attaching an “emergency clause” to a bill, they could cause it to take
effect immediately and thus make it invulnerable to referendum petitions.
Eventually, in 1929, the state supreme court ruled that the legislature
could not add an “emergency clause” to a bill in the absence of a real
emergency (State ex. rel. Satterthwaite v. Hinkle, 152 Wash. 221 [1929]).
Property tax limitation initiatives were on the ballot five times between
1924 and 1938. The proposals, which sought to limit the tax levy on real
and personal property to 40 mills, were passed by voters in 1932, 1934,
1936, and 1938, before the legislature acted to make the tax limit
permanent by putting it into the state constitution, a move that was
approved by voters in 1940.
Washington voters twice approved redistricting initiatives, once in 1930
and again in 1956. The latter initiative was sponsored by the state League
of Women Voters. Another successful election reform passed by voter
initiative was permanent voter registration, enacted in 1932.
In the years of the Great Depression, economic concerns frequently
became the subject of Washington state initiatives. Voters passed an
initiative authorizing creation of public utility districts in 1930, a measure
that helped make possible the state’s current system of locally controlled,
publicly owned electric utilities.
Perhaps the most innovative initiative of the 1930s was the 1936
“Production for Use” proposal. “Production for Use” was conceived by
Upton Sinclair, the Socialist author of The Jungle, who became a
Democrat in 1934 in order to run for California’s governorship. This
economic recovery plan called for the government to acquire idle
production facilities such as factories, hire the unemployed to work in
them, and promote sales of the goods through cooperatives. After Sinclair
lost in California, his Washington admirers decided to give the concept a
second chance by putting it on the ballot there in 1936. The Washington
Commonwealth Federation, which sponsored the initiative, was split by
internal dissension that year, and little was accomplished to promote the
measure’s passage. It lost by a nearly four to one margin.
Washington voters turned generous in 1948, when they approved
initiatives granting a bonus to veterans and increasing Social Security
benefits. In 1954 they rejected by a three to one margin an initiative to
restrict advertising for alcoholic beverages on television: a unique
proposal that, like “Production for Use” in 1936, never appeared on any
other ballot in the nation.
One of the most important postwar reforms accomplished by voter
initiative was the establishment of the state’s civil service system, which
was approved by the electorate in 1958 for county sheriff employees and
in 1960 for state employees. Prior to this, the “patronage” or “spoils system”
had filled bureaucracies with incompetent party hacks.
In 1968, the Washington State Medical Association sponsored an
initiative requiring drivers stopped by police for driving under the influence
of liquor to submit to breath tests. Voters approved it by a two to one
margin. That same year they approved a measure putting a lid on interest
rates paid by retail credit customers.
In 1970, environmentalists launched a petition drive for an initiative to
restrict shoreline development, more than a year before California
ecology groups launched their drive for a similar initiative. The Washington
state petition qualified for the ballot and prompted the legislature to
propose an alternative bill, which was on the 1972 ballot along with the
initiative measure. The legislature’s bill received more votes, and therefore
it took effect instead of the initiative. In 1988, however, when the choice
was between an environmentalist-backed toxic waste tax and cleanup
initiative and the legislature’s version, voters chose the initiative.
In 2000 along came a new initiative advocate, Tim Eyman. Like Bill
Sizemore in Oregon and Doug Bruce in Colorado, his passion was tax
reduction. He placed several initiatives on the ballot in 2000 and 2001
that passed overwhelmingly. However, the state supreme court struck
them down as violating the state’s stringent single subject rule for
initiatives.
Excerpted from the Initiative & Referendum Almanac by M. Dane Waters.