Well, to begin with, the Bellevue developer bought himself a losing initiative.

But here's the thing: Freeman's initiative is not losing by very much—only 21,000 votes at the moment.

So, really, two questions need to be asked: Did Freeman spend too much on this losing attempt at screwing up state tolling plans and preventing light rail from crossing I-90? Or did he actually spend too little when a small additional investment might have put him over the top?

The answers, it seems to me, are yes and yes.

First of all, in the early stages of this campaign Freeman seems to have spent way too much on signature gathering—$1,008,000 to Citizens Solutions Inc. for signatures, according to PDC reports. By contrast, Costco spent only $565,000 on signature gathering for its winning liquor privatization measure, I-1183.

True, Costco had a built-in advantage of being able to gather signatures easily (and basically for free) at its stores. But experts in this sort of thing say a well-funded signature gathering campaign costs at most $700,000 to $800,000.

Consider what the Service Employees International Union spent gathering signatures for the winning home health care measure, I-1163. Because of confusion about what was going to come out of last legislative session in terms of home health care funding, SEIU spent the early part of this year collecting signatures for two different possible initiatives at once (they only ended up filing one). For that, SEIU paid $1,035,048—about the same amount Freeman paid for collecting signatures for just the one initiative that Tim Eyman filed on his behalf.

On top of this, it's cheaper to collect signatures when you have a popular initiative because people want to sign—and if last night's results show anything, it's that I-1125, which spent virtually $0 on advertising, has an inherently popular, if sneaky, ballot title. (It mentions limits on tolling twice and doesn't say anything about destroying light rail—and 49.07 percent of Washingtonians voted yes.) Which makes it even weirder that it should have cost Freeman $1,008,000 to collect the necessary signatures.

This inherent appeal of I-1125's ballot title cuts another way, of course.

Yes, there was a well-financed opposition ready to match whatever resources Freeman threw at advertising. But imagine how little, relatively speaking, it would have cost him to get 25,000 or so additional votes in his favor.

It looks like Freeman made two bad business decisions here: He let himself be charged way too much for getting I-1125 on the ballot, and then, having already sunk a total of $1,093,000 into the measure, he folded on advertising when a marginal increase in his initial investment might have tipped the scales his way.