Knowthyneighbor.org, one of the groups, in the past has posted on the Web the names of petition signers in Arkansas, Florida and Massachusetts.

Signing a petition, these groups say, can be a step toward making law, and in fact, many ballot measures are intended to bypass or override the legislative process. That argument echoes one made by the Washington secretary of state’s office, which was barred by the courts from releasing the names even though the state’s public records law does not exempt the signatures from release; the office has released names of petition signers on other ballot measures in the past.

“Our disclosure law demands that we know who’s influencing the legislative process,” said David Ammons, a spokesman for Secretary of State Sam Reed, a Republican.

Opponents of releasing the names, led by Protect Marriage Washington, the group behind the referendum, say gay rights groups are threatening free speech by intimidating petition signers. James Bopp Jr., the lead lawyer for the group, filed affidavits from people who said they felt threatened for taking their position on the issue. Larry Stickney, the campaign manager of Protect Marriage Washington, has also complained of feeling threatened, he said.

“He has his children sleep in the hall of the middle of the house so they won’t be exposed to the street,” Mr. Bopp said.

Opponents note that until recently Washington, as a practice, did not release names of petition signers. State officials said the policy changed about a decade ago after a review of the public records act. In many states, petition signatures are often considered public records and many private firms and the national political parties have used them to build databases for voter outreach. The practice has become more common as states have become able to provide the information in digital form.

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In Washington State, a DVD with scanned images of signed petitions costs $25, but the laborious task of entering the names into a database is left to the buyer. In recent years, the state has received requests for copies of petition signatures from groups including real estate agents, teachers and a state conservative activist, Tim Eyman, who regularly leads antitax initiatives.

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Mr. Eyman did not follow through on those early requests, but Mr. Ammons said state records showed that a paid signature gatherer for Mr. Eyman has requested and received copies of petitions. Mr. Eyman is now part of a separate case in state court in which he is trying to keep signatures on his petitions private.

The Supreme Court has ruled in cases involving disclosure and petitions in the past, but it has not directly addressed whether names of signers should be kept private. And, said Richard L. Hasen, a professor specializing in election law at Loyola Law School in Los Angeles, “It’s never really confronted how the Internet changes the calculus.”

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As Eugene Volokh, a professor specializing in First Amendment issues at the University of California, Los Angeles, law school, put it, “Now, public access really is public access.”

Mr. Volokh said that the “talk of retaliation” had added complexity to the Washington case and raised the question of whether, if the names are disclosed, “you’re really not going to get an accurate measure of public sentiment” because people will become reluctant to sign petitions. He said confrontation had been a theme in other gay rights campaigns, including in California last year with Proposition 8, whose passage outlawed same-sex marriage there.

Concerns about intimidation and free speech have been raised in other states where knowthyneighbor.org has posted signatures. Tom Lang, the group’s co-director, said some gay rights organizations had distanced themselves from his work “because they understand the provocative nature of what we do.”

Created in 2005 amid the fight over same-sex marriage in Massachusetts, the Web site was founded on a belief that “for social change to happen, there has to be a shaming part,” Mr. Lang said. Discussion, not intimidation, is the goal, he said.

“I’m trying to get you to understand that if you’re going to try to take away my rights I want you to know what you’re doing,” he said. “In Washington you’re being deprived of that.”

Arline Isaacson, a lobbyist who is co-chairwoman of the Massachusetts Gay and Lesbian Political Caucus, said her group first posted petition signers’ names on the Internet as far back as 2001, when the idea was solely to serve as a check against fraud in signature gathering.

Ms. Isaacson now supports the way knowthyneighbor.org uses the signatures. She noted that the petition process was layered with various stages of public access, from the moment a signature gatherer engages with a potential signer, to the private databases those gatherers might build with the information, to the state validation process, which is often observed by advocates on various sides of whatever issue is at hand.

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“These names were never meant to be private,” Ms. Isaacson said. “It’s just that people never took advantage of it before.”

John Matsusaka, head of the Initiative and Referendum Institute at the University of Southern California, said the debate was so new that its broad implications remained unclear.

“It’s the Internet,” he said, “that you can put all this stuff online, that’s now making it much more potent.”