Tim Eyman is confident that Initiative 747 and its 1 percent cap on property tax growth will be reinstated after the Washington state Supreme Court gets its hands on King County Superior Court Judge Mary Roberts’ invalidation of the 2001 ballot measure. He may be right.

Roberts held this week the initiative misled voters by saying it would restrict tax revenues less harshly than it did. Voters couldn’t accurately measure the consequences of passing it, the judge reasoned, so she declared it “null and void.”

According to Eyman, though, the errors were unavoidable (see “Fatal flaw”) and, anyway, the state Voters Pamphlet spelled the facts out accurately. The voters knew what was at stake.

But while that dispute rests in the Supreme Court’s hands, Washingtonians should re-examine the way their 94-year-old initiative process has been corrupted. Unless they rescue it, sideshows like the one over Initiative 747 will be the norm.

Voters approved the initiative process in 1912 as the seventh amendment to the state constitution. They did so because the Legislature, as the Supreme Court later put it, “had ceased to be responsive to the popular will.”

Unfortunately, popular will has little to do with today’s initiatives, which are usually backed by well-financed organizations who want to circumvent the more deliberative, and more open, process of the Legislature.

A year ago, for example, state doctors and trial lawyers offered rival approaches to medical malpractice reform. This was no popular uprising, it was a battle of titans, who spent more than $9 million on it. Both measures lost. In all, more than $15 million was raised and spent on the various initiatives on the 2005 ballot.

Eyman himself isn’t a special-interest organization, but neither is he a frustrated citizen bypassing an arrogant Legislature. He is an entrepreneur who takes a cut of the campaign funds as income and brings new initiatives to market each year the way Hasbro brings toys.

Filing and passing initiatives in Washington state has become a sophisticated operation in which paid signature-gatherers blanket the state collecting names on petitions drafted without public participation.

In the Legislature, with all its imperfections, bills are exposed to public and legislative examination. They are scrutinized and debated with an opportunity for all stakeholders to weigh in. When problems arise, technical or ideological, amendments can be drafted to clear the logjams. By the time a bill is up for a vote, it has been thoroughly scrubbed, and it still has to satisfy both the Senate and the House, as well as the governor. Checks and balances abound.

Not so with initiatives. No wonder such measures run into so much trouble in the courts.

Initiative 297, passed in 2004 to prohibit dumping radioactive waste at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation until it’s cleaned up, was invalidated this week by a U.S. District Court. Another federal court decision in March overturned a 1992 initiative that addressed the use of teachers’ union dues. Even the confusion underlying Judge Roberts’ ruling on Initiative 747 has its roots in an overturned initiative.

And speaking of Roberts’ decision on Initiative 747, she based it on the language of the law. As Eyman and other initiative specialists know, hardly anyone reads the petitions they sign. The same with voters. Instead, they base their understanding on Voters Pamphlet statements and paid political advertising, all bankrolled by the institutions who stand to benefit.

If this is grass roots, it’s time to resod.