Death initiative is on its way

The arguments for and against Initiative 1000, which would allow doctors to prescribe lethal medicines to patients with six months or less to live, remain essentially the same as they were when former Gov. Booth Gardner filed the initiative in January.

What was different Wednesday were the boxes of petitions supporters turned in to the Secretary of State's Office — an estimated 320,000 signatures, more than enough to send Initiative 1000 to voters in November.

"Being on the ballot, I think it's the difference between flirting and dating. It's more serious now," said initiative opponent Duane French.

French and others view the initiative as sanctioning immoral suicide; Gardner and his backers call it "death with dignity."

But since filing the initiative, supporters of I-1000 did what most would-be initiative runners never do: turned in hundreds of thousands of signatures backing it.

Gardner said Wednesday he was feeling more and more confident of his proposal's chances in November.

"I think we're going to go all the way," he said. "I'll bet on it."

For an initiative to make the ballot, supporters must turn in 225,000 signatures from registered voters. Officials at the Secretary of State's Office check a sample of the signatures, and in the past, they typically have invalidated 18 percent of them.

As a result, to clear the requirement, supporters usually need to turn in at least 264,000 signatures.

Of 47 initiatives filed this year, three are expected to collect enough signatures to make the ballot.

In addition to I-1000, there's I-1029. Backed by the Service Employees International Union, the measure would set higher training standards for people who care for the elderly or disabled in their homes, whom the union represents.

The third measure apparently headed to the ballot is I-985. The latest effort by Tim Eyman, it would open car-pool lanes to everyone at almost all times and require traffic lights to be synchronized, along with other traffic measures.

The others, on topics including state-paid embryo transplants, illegal immigrants and the living conditions of egg-laying hens, never got off the ground.

Even Eyman, who does this sort of thing for a living, filed a dozen proposals before settling on I-985 this year.

The other ideas, such as transferring all of the powers of the Port of Seattle to King County, were testing the waters, Eyman said.

"Research and development; we're always filing initiatives, fine-tuning them," he said. "It's just a matter of kind of feeling things out as the year goes on, because the political environment changes almost on a daily basis sometimes."

The deadline to turn in signatures is 5 p.m. today.