Initiative activist Tim Eyman has been rebuffed in his attempt to overturn the Office of Secretary of State’s policy of treating initiative and referendum petitions as releasable public records.

That question is, of course, being litigated in federal court as we speak (or blog).  Social conservatives who oppose the state’s new domestic partnership law have secured a federal court order blocking release of Referendum 71 petitions. Secretary Sam Reed, backed by the counsel of Attorney General Rob McKenna, has headed to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Eyman, the state’s most prolific initiative sponsor, widely circulated a letter he sent Reed late last week asking him to reverse his policy of allowing petitions to be released as public records.  Shane Hamlin, assistant director of elections and head of the initiative and referendum program, replied Monday that Eyman’s demand presumes Reed would “ignore state law and disregard the position of the attorney general on these matters.”

Regardless of what previous secretaries have done with petitions, Reed and McKenna believe the state’s voter-approved Public Records Act includes no exemption for shielding legitimate public records from release, Hamlin wrote Eyman.  When people take part in the referendum and initiative process, they are acting as citizen legislators, an inherently public act, he wrote. The use of “direct democracy” is quite different from the secrecy of the ballot box.

“The elected Legislature does not act in secret. Citizens engaging in legislative action should not be permitted to act in secrecy either,” Hamlin wrote.

Postscript: A new Elway Poll shows that this isn’t the popular position to take. The respondents said by a 52 percent to 39 percent margin that petitions should be kept private. Both sides of the R-71 battle concurred on this point. But regarding Eyman’s own Initiative 1033, 62 percent of those who plan to vote with him said I-1033 petitions should be kept private and 54 percent of his opponents say they want to see who signed his petitions.  (The horse is out of the barn on this one: The I-1033 petitions were already previously released to one requester, the National Education Association…)