Initiative promoter Tim Eyman (photo left, bio here), who is well known to Washington voters, has been ordered to pay the state $2.9 million “for costs and fees related to the campaign finance lawsuit brought against him by Attorney General Bob Ferguson … in addition to the $2.6 million penalty Eyman was ordered to pay … [for] soliciting kickbacks, laundering donations and flouting campaign finance law in a long-running scheme to enrich himself,” Seattle-based KING 5 TV News reported on Friday, April 16, 2021. Read story here.
Eyman achieved notoriety by promoting tax-repeal initiatives, many of which passed but were thrown out by courts. He turned it into a business, and allegedly diverted campaign donations to his own use. In 2019, he was arrested in 2019 for taking an office chair out of a store without paying for it, which resulted in a deferred prosecution deal.
About half the states allow citizen initiatives. Washington’s initiative process is explained here. Allowing voters to directly legislate is controversial, and in Washington, has sometimes produced wacky results, as when voters in 2014 approved an initiative to decrease public school class sizes, but rejected the companion initiative to raise the sales tax to pay for it. As hiring more teachers isn’t free, the class-size reduction couldn’t be implemented.
Something similar happened in Seattle, where voters approved a monorail scheme several times, but finally rejected it after the state legislature closed a tax loophole that enabled them to evade paying the vehicle tax to fund it by registering their vehicles at post office boxes outside the city.
I think this fits into a broader, ingrained element of the American psyche. In our deal-making culture, people always want something for nothing. The Detroit car industry figured out a century ago that the typical American car shopper will happily pay an extra $2500 sticker price to get a $2000 rebate. Or so it seems. P. T. Barnum had a handle on it when he said, “There’s a sucker born every minute.”
Eyman traded on this mentality for years, by selling the notion to Washington voters that they could get public services without paying taxes for them, and lined his own pockets in the process. But nothing in this world is free, his personal profiteering was illegal, and that eventually caught up with him. He hasn’t fared well in elective politics, either; when he ran for governor in 2020, he got less than 7% of the vote in the primary, well behind lesser-known Republican candidates.