(The Center Square) – Redmond, Washington-based Northwest Progressive Institute (NPI) took extreme umbrage at media outlets using advisory votes on the ballot as a way to measure public opinion.

“‘Advisory votes’ are in reality propaganda conceived by Tim Eyman to undermine public confidence in the work of the people's elected representatives,” wrote DPI Executive Director Andrew Villeneuve. “They aren't meant to gauge anything, and they can't be used to measure public opinion.”

Eyman is an anti-tax activist, businessman, and former 2020 Republican gubernatorial hopeful.

“Because they are prejudicially worded, the responses are worthless,” Villeneuve penned in the Wednesday missive that largely mirrors the sentiment of an October blog at The Cascadia Advocate, NPI’s publication arm. “The ‘results’ simply don't tell us how voters truly feel about the state's new capital gains tax on the wealthy or the other two bills the Legislature passed last session that happened to increase state revenue.”

Advisory Vote No. 37, which has garnered the lion’s share of media attention, concerns controversial legislation establishing a 7% tax on capital gains of the sale of assets like stocks and bonds above $250,000. Advisory Vote No. 36 deals with a telephone tax to support a suicide prevention line. Advisory Vote No. 38 places a tax on premiums collected by certain car insurance companies. All three measures are failing.

“As any reputable pollster knows, asking a loaded question in public opinion research produces garbage data,” Villeneuve said.

Paul Guppy, interim president of the Seattle-based Washington Policy Center, takes a different view.

“Washington Policy Center takes advisory votes seriously,” he said, noting advisory votes offer the chance to hear back from a much larger number of people as compared to typical polls with much smaller sample sizes.

“It’s not a sample,” he said of advisory votes. “It’s a direct answer to a question.”

That all three advisory votes are failing “strengthens the position of the people opposed to these taxes,” he said.

“They call it propaganda” when the results are not to their liking, Guppy said of NPI’s characterization of advisory votes. “It’s picking and choosing.”

He also took issue with NPI’s claim voters aren’t informed that regardless of how they vote on advisory votes, nothing will change.

“But it's important to go a step further when writing about ‘advisory votes’ and explain that voters are not told that their collective responses will not change fiscal policy,” Villeneuve wrote. “There is no disclaimer anywhere.”

Noting that the non-binding nature of advisory votes is ubiquitous in news coverage, Guppy said NPI is essentially deriding voters as “rubes and dupes.”

As to NPI’s claim advisory votes are prejudicial because the wording follows a format created by Eyman, Guppy pointed out advisory votes were “enacted democratically.”

Advisory votes made their way onto Washington state ballots after voters approved Initiative 960 (I-960) – courtesy of anti-tax activist Eyman – in 2007. That initiative required any tax increase proposed in the state legislature be passed with a two-thirds majority in both chambers, among other provisions.

A state Supreme Court ruling later gutted I-960 with the exception of two provisions still codified in state law today. One requires the state to hold advisory votes on all tax increases not approved by voters. The other requires the state to make public how each member of the legislature voted on a bill that increases taxes or fees.

Finally, Guppy pointed out a number of advisory votes have been given a thumbs up by voters.

According to the Secretary of State’s Office, voters have decided 10 times to maintain tax hikes: three times in 2013, two times in 2014, two times in 2015 and three times in 2019.

NPI is going after the wrong target in Guppy’s view.

“It’s going after the origin of something, rather than the thing itself,” he said.

How all of this will play out in the upcoming legislative session remains to be seen.

Senate Bill 5182, introduced this year, would replace advisory votes with information in the Voters’ Pamphlet about the legislature’s fiscal decisions.