Walker seeks to establish petitioner rights
Last week, a federal judge lifted an injunction blocking Oregon's new domestic partnerships law from taking effect. The ruling centered on a narrow but important technicality in Oregon law. If you sign an initiative petition, and your signature is wrongly excluded, you currently have no right to have your signature counted.
State Senator Vicki Walker is trying to do something about that.
She has introduced legislation to move the certification of initiative petitions into the Secretary of State's office. The bill retains much of Oregon's existing signature validation process, but includes greater protections against people's signatures being wrongly excluded -- at least, if an amendment that will be voted on separately is retained in the final legislation.
That Amendment reads:
The Secretary of State shall allow a qualified elector who is selected as part of the statistical sample, but whose signature is rejected during the signature verification process, to affirm the signature's authenticity for the purposes of determining whether a state initiative or referendum petition qualifies for the ballot.
Because Oregon uses a random sampling method to determine whether an initiative petition has collected enough signatures to qualify for the ballot, each person who is excluded can strike off hundreds of valid signatures, resulting in much lower validity rates for affected petitions.
In last week's case, several people who were part of the statistical sample used by the state to determine whether an initiative petition has enough signatures to qualify, had their names wrongly rejected during the signature verification process.
Initiative rights proponents and good government groups support the increased efficiency and cost savings of the proposal, but contend that the state needs to provide a remedy when people are wrongly excluded during signature verification. Such a remedy, proponents say, is a necessary check against the appearance of corruption or partisan abuse.
The Senate Elections and Rules Committee, chaired by Kate Brown, will hear the bill in committee room B at 3:30 on Thursday.
actually signing
This sounds like a good idea as long as people who SIGN their vote by mail envelopes but PRINT their names on petitions without signing aren't given a free pass. If the petition says "print your name here" and "sign here" and the person only prints their name and doesn't sign, that signature should not be valid because the signer did not follow the rules.