Is health care worker initiative legal?

The Olympian • Published July 20, 2008

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Secretary of State Sam Reed appears to be skating on thin legal ice with his decision to accept Initiative 1029 signatures and send the measure to the voters for their consideration in November.

The courts need to decide this issue quickly so that supporters and opponents of I-1029 have ample time to make their case before a fall election.

The initiative would require state certification and criminal background checks for all long-term-care workers and boost training requirements from 34 to 75 hours. That is more training time than state lawmakers wanted to pay for earlier this year.

What's at issue, now, is not the merits of the initiative proposal but whether the initiative petitions themselves are flawed.

In Washington, there are two very different types of initiatives, and therefore two very different processes followed to adoption or rejection:

An initiative to the people goes directly to the ballot for an up or down vote. It's a simple, straight-forward process.

An initiative to the Legislature is more complicated and uses the legislative process as a screening mechanism. Once lawmakers have received an initiative to the Legislature they have three options. They can adopt the initiative, in which case it becomes law. They can ignore the initiative, in which case it goes on to the fall ballot for a "yes" or "no" vote. The third option for lawmakers is to draft an alternative initiative, in which case both the original and the alternative go to the ballot for voters to decide.

The problem in the case of I-1029 is that it was drafted as an initiative to the Legislature, but was submitted as an initiative to the people. The legal question is whether Reed, as the state's top election official, was within his legal rights to accept an initiative to the Legislature as an initiative to the people. Or should Reed have rejected the initiative petitions because they were flawed?

"We do not choose to disenfranchise 300,000 voters (who signed I-1029) because the format in the petition itself was incorrect," said David Ammons, Reed's spokesman.