I-917 signatures may fall short

OLYMPIA – Tim Eyman’s “$30 Car Tabs” initiative has hit a big bump in the road.

Three weeks after the state’s most prolific initiative filer said he submitted more than 300,000 signatures to get I-917 on the fall ballot, election officials say Eyman actually turned in just 266,006.

As a result, the measure, which seemed certain to appear on the ballot, now looks iffy.

Eyman said he still thinks it’s likely the measure will make it. He insists his group turned in 300,353 signatures by the July 7 deadline. The numbers were tracked carefully by a paid signature-gathering firm and by Eyman’s Spokane-based administrative staff.

“Because of our procedures, we are highly confident that our records are correct,” Eyman wrote in a letter Friday to election officials. He called for a recount and check “to determine when the missing voter signature sheets were pilfered.”

The secretary of state’s staff did a recount. It turned up 197 signatures that had been miscounted in the initial tally.

“It’s just a matter of counting pages and somebody misses a page,” said election director Nick Handy. “It’s just a matter of human error.”

But Handy said the agency is confident that they’ve now counted everything Eyman turned in. Handy said there’s virtually no way that 34,544 signatures – a minimum of 1,400 petitions – could just disappear. The counting staff are supervised by election officials and watched by a state trooper. Each petition is immediately photocopied. And the documents are stored in a locked vault at the state archives.

“We’re very comfortable that we have all of the pages and all of the signatures that were turned in,” said Handy.

“I’m as conspiratorial as the next guy, but even I have trouble believing they just tossed 35,000 voter signatures,” Eyman told supporters in an e-mail Wednesday. “But we have weekly reports showing our voter signature counts and we’re certain we turned in 300,353 voter signatures.”

Next Tuesday or Wednesday, crews will start comparing the signatures on the petitions to a state voting database. Signers must be registered voters in Washington. Invariably, some of the signers are rejected. Some live in other states. Some aren’t registered to vote. Because of that rejection rate, election officials advise initiative groups to have a “cushion” of at least 20 percent beyond the 224,880 required signatures. But the state’s count leaves Eyman with a dangerously thin cushion. If even 15 percent of the names are rejected – which would not be unusual – I-917 won’t get on the ballot.

Previous Eyman initiatives had rejection rates of about 17 percent to 23 percent, Handy said.

Once the signature verification starts next week, Handy said, officials should know within three to four days whether the measure is likely to qualify.