What does the motivations of the petition-gatherer have to do with anything? Residents don’t look for signatures at the mall? People who are passionate enough about the ideas don’t don’t gather signatures at the mall?
When you sign petitions (assuming there was an issue you cared enough about to sign and had the opportunity to do so), do you decide based on the person’s background and motivations, or based on what the petition actually says?
Look, the petitions are just a gatekeeping device, to keep the number of initiatives down to a dull roar.
And in any case, is the problem that the signature gatherers were from out of state, or was the problem that they were paid? If you’re objecting to the fact that they were paid per signature, then their out of state status doesn’t matter, does it? And no blonde is going to chase after people shoving her cleavage at them trying to get signatures, because they only get a few cents per signature. They’re trying to maximize their signatures/hour, not try to get everyone who passes to sign. Spending more than a minute trying to convince someone is a waste of time.
In any case, it’s easy to ban paid signature gathering and require that the gatherers are all volunteers, and that’s the solution to your objection, not worry about outside agitators.
I don’t have a complaint or even a dog in this fight.
I was asking a straightforward question. **Why **does it matter?
I am aware that it currently does matter. I fail to understand why the law was written that way.
More’s the pity.
Signed, a resident of Washington State where the bar to getting initiatives on the ballot is even lower, and the constant roar of ignorant citizen-level meddling is not dull but deafening, so we might as well get some jiggle out of the chaos.
Changing the interpretation of “resident” from the one that had been set by case law precedent is troubling. I’d be interested in knowing if the OK Supreme Court set down a rationale for their later decision to interpret it differently. Also, if they pointed out why an effort to rely on the previous case would not be seen by a reasonable person to constitute a good faith effort to follow the law as written.
With my luck, I’d get Tim “I-man” shoving his “nether cleavage” at me.
Which, FWIW, is a pretty accurate description of the way we elect the President.
If so, the conduct of the powers-that-be in this matter is egregious. Shameful. But not treasonous.
Thanks to Captain Amazing for his excellent summation.
If I was a resident of OK I’d be mad at the AG who’s wasting valuable resources prosecuting the out of staters’ for trying to change OK law. Doesn’t he have enough real crime to go after?
I don’t really mind that. It’s the fact that once it was changed, the three were indicted. They seem to have been gaming the system a little, but operating within the law as it was.
This really hits the nail on the head. Seems odd to me.
Here’s a story about the indictment from the Tulsa World:
http://www.tulsaworld.com/news/article.aspx?articleID=071003_1_A9_hThey33120
Doing some research it looks like there was never a court decision on the cockfighting thing. It looks like what happened was that during the petition drive to ban it, a pro-cockfighting group complained to the Attorney General’s office that the anti-cockfighting petitioners were bringing in outside people, and the AG’s office said basically, “We don’t plan to charge them”. So it’s not the court that’s acting inconsistantly or against precedent.
Which is why it smells of being untrue. I’d withhold judgment until someone comes up with the Oklahoma Supreme Court case in question. :dubious:
And on reading the article linked in post #32, it seems that the most recent pronouncement upon the residency requirement is a federal district court judge’s ruling that the requirement is constitutional, which came in response to a filing by a group called “Yes on Term Limits.”
Like I said, there doesn’t appear to have been one, just an earlier failure to prosecute by the AG. When I was making my original summary, I wasn’t certifying that any of the information on the linked webpage was accurate, I was just attempting to summarize the argument as laid out on the webpage, because some people had said they were having trouble understanding it.
I wonder if any of the three were registered to vote in Oklahoma before they started petitioning. Seems that if that were the case it would be very difficult for the state to declare that they were not legally residents.
Tris
Or, they could tack on a fraudulent-registration charge. In for a penny . . .
Ok, here is what actually happened:
According to the allegations of the groups involved in obtaining the signatures, they were told by someone in the Oklahoma Secretary of State’s office that, to be a “bona fide resident” of the state of Oklahoma, all someone had to do was make the assertion that, while they were in Oklahoma for the purpose of gathering the signatures, they had an Oklahoma address and intended to remain in Oklahoma for the duration of their employment gathering the signatures. The law in question states:
The Oklahoma Constitution defines an elector as being a “bona fide resident.” There being no prior court pronouncement upon the issue of what is sufficient to be a “bona fine resident” for similar purposes, the Court determined that several of the people used to gather the signatures for the proposed TABOR initiative were not “bona fide residents” of Oklahoma. Thus, the Court invalidated the signatures they gathered, and as a result, the petition was not able to be certified for the ballot.
You can read the Oklahoma Supreme Court’s findings and opinion here.
As for why the law exists, there are three reasons, each equally valid. The Oklahoma Supreme Court noted that, since the petition circulator is required to verify that the person who signed is indeed a valid signatory, and will be called upon as needed by the Secretary of State or the Oklahoma courts to establish signature validity, it is important that they be local to Oklahoma. Second, the use of out-of-state paid signature gatherers is a significant assault upon the initiative system, since it threatens the ability of residents of a state to use the process to make needed changes. As long as out-of-state interests with money keep attempting to influence the law of states where those interests don’t reside, the danger is significant that the whole initiative process will be modified or eliminated (having lived in California for much of my life, you can take my word that many would love to see the whole process just go away for good!). And thirdly, although the initiative process is established as a way for residents of Oklahoma to make needed changes, it is intended that it not be an easy process. It’s supposed to be a struggle to accomplish; else Oklahoma runs the risk of becoming bogged down by initiative after initiative, over whatever comes into someone’s head, the cause du jour, so to speak. That whole aspect is totally overturned if you can just call in the big guns from Chicago or LA or New York and have them bring in to the state their hired signature gatherers.
And, as I indicated, a federal judge, specifically Judge Tim Leonard of the District Court of Oklahoma, on September 7th, 2007, ruled that the statute was constitutional. There is no indication if Judge Leonard applied the restrictive meaning of “bona fide resident” adopted by the Oklahoma Supreme Court in 2006.
Very enlightening, DSYoungEsq, thank you for posting it. I’m feeling considerably less troubled after having read it.
Except that it still ignores previous court findings. The law was changed judicially after the fact to prevent them from getting signatures, and then the lawyers started threatening them with jail to teach them a lesson.
I really don’t care what they were pushing for. I don’t care if they were advocating the use of nuclear weapons as hunting gear or demanding the genetic combination of Hitler and Stalin into a freakish offspring to play in their boy band. I don’t care if people from that state hate them and don’t want outsiders to come in.
They obeyed the existing laws. The government did not. If the people of Oklahoma don’t want people canvassing them, they should’ve changed the law beforehand. There is no other [rational] argument, except “Well, I just don’t like them, so I’m going to ignore when the government deliberately targets and attacks innocent citizens.”
I’m still fuming over this. :mad: