R-74 goes to ballot; charter schools going to court

Brad Shannon | The Olympian • Published July 18, 2012 Modified June 13, 2012

• 0 comments

Backers of Initiative 1240 say they are not giving up their extremely late launch of a charter-schools measure for the November ballot. They face a signature deadline of July 6 but before going to the streets they first are asking a judge to tinker with the wording of the ballot title on Friday.

That delay leaves precious little time for the Yes on 1240/Washington Coalition for Public Charter Schools to gather the 241,153 valid signatures required. But the group has already collected $325,000 – topped by $200,000 from Bill Gates and $100,000 from Katherine Binder of EMFCO Holdings. Binder gave at least $255,000 in 2007 to help pass a constitutional amendment that reduced the vote requirement for school levies to a simple majority.

The third major donor is Nicolas Hanauer, a Democrat who has been very public about his differences with other Democrats over the charter schools issue.

This is the fourth try for charter schools and Washington voters have rejected the concept three times before. But advocates including Republican gubernatorial candidate Rob McKenna note that the state is one of only nine that don’t allow them.

The legal challenge to I-1240's ballot wording was written by Harry Korrell, a lawyer with Davis Wright Tremaine who was part of Dino Rossi’s legal team that challenged the 2004 gubernatorial election result and more recently defended the Building Industry Association of Washington.

Korrell’s brief, filed in Thurston County Superior Court on Friday, says the ballot title is inaccurate in saying I-1240 “authorizes” up to 40 charter schools. He argues the word should be changed to “allows” on grounds the measure “allows a new commission and local school boards to authorize a limited number of public charter schools.”

Korrell also wants a wording change in the longer ballot measure summary to refer to say that “qualified” organizations could operate schools rather than “certain” ones.

In other ballot news that has been widely reported this week, the Office of the Secretary of State certified the same-sex marriage measure – Referendum 74 – for the Nov. 6 ballot. Religious conservatives filed about twice the required number of signatures to force the Legislature’s same-sex marriage law onto the ballot, asking voters to either ratify or reject it.

That is not the last word on same-sex marriage in this election. A separate group of religious conservatives is collecting signatures for Initiative 1192, which faces the early July deadline. It would ask voters to enact a one-man, one-woman definition of marriage in state law.

State elections officials also have asked the State Patrol to look into 51 pages of petitions for R-74 containing 1,001 signatures suspected to be forgeries.