House Bill 2260 adds new procedural requirements to chapter 29A.72 RCW and amends RCW 29A.72.110, .120, and .130 to require that every person who circulates an initiative or referendum petition sign the circulator declaration on each petition sheet. The amended petition forms must include fields for circulator signature, date, address, state, and county, and the circulator declaration is to be sworn or affirmed under penalty of false swearing. The bill also preserves warnings that forgery of petition signatures is a class C felony under chapter 29A.84 RCW and that offering consideration to induce signing is a gross misdemeanor. The bill creates a new section requiring the secretary of state to verify that a petition signer’s residence address on the petition matches the residence address on the signer’s affidavit of voter registration or a previous affidavit; signatures without a matching residence address, missing required information, or no specified residence address must not be counted as valid. Minor address discrepancies (for example, incomplete or incorrect apartment or unit numbers) must not invalidate a signature, a signature invalidated under this verification does not affect other valid signatures on the same petition, and the change does not alter use of statistical sampling under RCW 29A.72.230. The bill also states that RCW 9A.46.020 applies to harassment against petition circulators without precluding other remedies. Type of legal change: primarily procedural changes to petition form content and signature-verification processes, and amendments to existing election statute provisions. The provided text does not create a new crime or add new penalties beyond citing existing criminal provisions; it references existing penalties for forgery and inducement and applies existing harassment statute protections to circulators. The extracted text is incomplete in places (a portion of the circulator declaration for RCW 29A.72.130 is cut off, and other possible sections, enforcement details, and effective dates are not included), so additional provisions or penalty changes may exist elsewhere in the bill. The bill was prefiled 01/05/26, read first time 01/12/26, and referred to the Committee on State Government & Tribal Relations.

If enacted, campaigns and initiative proponents will likely need to change how they collect signatures: every sheet must include a sworn circulator declaration with the circulator’s signature, date, and address, and each signer must give the residence address that matches their voter registration. That will probably raise costs and time for signature drives because circulators must sign every sheet and proponents may need to screen or re-check addresses before submitting to avoid having signatures thrown out. Petition signers risk having their signatures invalidated if the address on the petition does not match their registration (though small omissions like a unit number should not cause invalidation), and circulators face greater personal exposure and legal risk because they are attesting under penalty of false swearing. The Secretary of State will take on an explicit duty to verify that petition addresses match voter registration and to exclude nonmatching signatures, which could increase workload or require procedural changes, though the bill preserves use of statistical sampling for verification. Harassment protections for circulators are emphasized, and existing criminal penalties for forgery or paying for signatures remain in force. Important details are missing from the extracted text—some circulator declaration language is incomplete, the bill’s penalties beyond existing statutes aren’t spelled out here, and no effective date or implementation procedures are included—so the exact administrative burden and enforcement approach are uncertain.