On November 8, voters across the state of Washington will decide Ballot Initiative 1501, the Seniors and Vulnerable Individuals’ Safety and Financial Crimes Prevention Act. If passed, the measure’s proponents claim, I-1501 will increase criminal penalties for targeting seniors and vulnerable individuals in acts of identity theft and consumer fraud and will prohibit the release of any public records that may facilitate such crimes. But it would accomplish neither objective. The measure’s sole sponsor, the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), is brazenly attempting to deceive voters and misuse the statewide initiative process.
To look into the facts is to discover that I-1501’s intent has nothing to do with protecting citizens, and everything to do with altering the Public Records Act to prevent the Freedom Foundation, a conservative think tank, from obtaining the membership list of the SEIU – and, specifically, from obtaining the names of members who serve as home care providers and informing them of their constitutional right to opt out of paying union fees.
In 2014, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state-employed care providers have the option of leaving unions such as the SEIU, and since then, the Freedom Foundation has aggressively taken action. Its strategy is to file public records requests, obtain union membership lists, and contact every member, even if it has to go door to door, to inform those who have been left in the dark that they can stop paying into the union. “A lot of people didn’t even know they were in the union, or that they were having the dues being deducted from their Medicaid reimbursement checks,” Brian Minnich, the executive vice president of the Freedom Foundation, tells National Review.
The Freedom Foundation effortlessly obtained SEIU 925’s membership list through the Public Record Act and notified members of their rights. The union shrunk nearly 60 percent. In the courts, Washington’s other SEIU chapter, SEIU 775, challenged the Freedom Foundation’s use of public records, and the Freedom Foundation prevailed. The state supreme court refused to hear the union’s appeal. In the aftermath of its legal loss, SEIU has donated $1.6 million to fund I-1501 public advocacy in a final attempt to prevent the think tank from obtaining its membership list. The authors of I-1501 don’t explicitly state its true purpose, though. They have disguised the initiative with the spin that it protects seniors and vulnerable individuals from identity theft.
This notion that I-1501 would impede identity theft by prohibiting the release of public records is ludicrous. The state’s Public Records Act does not allow individuals to request sensitive information, and, as Minnich notes, the lists in question show only a member’s name and date of birth. “I-1501 is a Trojan horse,” as the Seattle Times editorial board perfectly describes the initiative and the SEIU’s attempt to deceive voters. Identity theft is a hot topic, and few people would oppose what seems to be an effort to close significant loopholes that identity thieves could exploit.
The SEIU has fully funded the campaign for I-1501, but it’s not just the powerful union that has deceived voters. The state’s attorney general has a responsibility to validate the title of each initiative, and clearly I-1501’s title does not represent that it would alter the Public Records Act. “The whole thing is just insidious,” Minnich says. “How in the world could you come up with a ballot title like that?”
