(The Center Square) – As Washington voters are preparing to decide whether to repeal the state’s new 9.9% income tax, a longtime online resource documenting Washington’s income tax voting history disappeared and then suddenly reappeared in the last 24 hours.
Jason Mercier of the Mountain States Policy Center first notified The Center Square on Tuesday that an historical document he created nearly a decade ago detailing Washingtonians’ voting history on income taxes was suddenly no longer available on an archived page link.
“About ten years ago I manually went through every election result in Washington’s history going back 100 years to see how many times Washington voted on income taxes. And I came across the six constitutional amendments that were rejected and the four additional ballot measures.”
Mercier said he knew the collection of data could have a wider reach, so he sent it over to the Secretary of State’s office, and then Secretary Kim Wyman.
“I said hey I compiled this and maybe you want to post it and they posted it. They created that web page. So that’s been available, at least since 2018. It has always been pulled from every time the income tax has been discussed by politicians or [for] ballot measures.”
“So, it was quite a shock yesterday that as I was creating a post talking about the six times Washingtonians had rejected constitutional amendments for an income tax, that it was just gone. I know it was just there because I just wrote a study on Initiative 645 and I footnoted it,” he recalled.
“And sure enough, to use the Wayback Machine, it was live as of October 12 and it was kind of bizarre in the middle of an election on an income tax, the resource is gone,” he said, referring to the Internet archive site.
Mercier said he does not believe Secretary of State Steve Hobbs was behind the sudden deletion of the page.
“He hasn’t had an agenda, so I didn’t assume it was a direction from him, but it was probably just some web maintenance type of issue, and that’s kind of what it turned out to be.”
The Center Square reached out to the office of Secretary Hobbs on Tuesday about the page being eliminated and received a response via email.
“The page was deactivated as part of a project decommissioning obsolete web servers. The page wasn’t linked on our website, and users could only access it by external search or a direct link,” wrote Helen Smith in the Communications Office for SOS.
Within hours of a video from Mercier detailing his concerns about the site being removed, social media post comments indicated a distrust of government to be honest about the income tax debate.
Mercier told The Center Square he was pleased that pressure on SOS led to the site being restored on Wednesday.
“A lot of other people relied on this and reached out. Thankfully, the site’s back up.”
“As a voter going through these resources and trying to go to the states source page and then seeing the pages that don’t exist anymore, that’s not in anybody’s best interest,” said Mercier.
It’s unclear if media pressure combined with social media posts led to the site being restored, which include the history of Washingtonians rejecting an income tax over decades, dating back to the 1930s.
“We’ve shifted to a different way of sharing ballot measure data. That said, we heard from several people who used this page for research, so we moved the content onto the new site,” said Smith from SOS communications in reference to restoring the information.
I-645 will appear on the general election ballot, asking voters to decide on the income tax, which currently amounts to a 9.9% tax on income above $1 million. A “yes” vote would repeal the tax, while a “no” vote would retain it.
Voting begins Oct. 16 and continues through Election Day on Nov. 3.