AG Pruitt Gets It So Very Wrong On Petitioning In Oklahoma

Ballot Access Reform is gaining more and more allies everyday. We have the media, think tanks, many people and political organizations on our side. Unfortunately, it is becoming more and more clear that we will have few friends in leadership positions in our own state government. Thankfully, many of those leaders are outing themselves as ignorant on the issue of ballot access reform. The latest political leader to get ballot access wrong is Oklahoma’s Attorney General Scott Pruitt.

In a recent op-ed in the Tulsa World, AG Pruitt spoke at length about his lawsuit against Colorado over its citizen led and passed legalization of marijuana. Buried in that op-ed was a nice nugget of ignorance of ballot access.

In Oklahoma, for example, where it’s relatively easy to get a state question on the ballot (ask any voter who’s had to navigate a host of such questions on Election Day), a recent well-funded and well-organized effort to get a marijuana legalization question on the ballot managed to garner a meager 75,000 signatures — less than half the number needed, and a number that equates to less than 2 percent of Oklahoma’s population. In other words, Oklahoma’s people have spoken loud and clear: They believe marijuana to be a harmful drug that shouldn’t be legal in any circumstance.

There is so much wrong with this statement that I will have to break it apart and rebut it piece by piece. First up:

In Oklahoma, for example, where it’s relatively easy to get a state question on the ballot

This is so wrong on many levels. Oklahoma’s initiative process is not all easy. News 9 recently ran an article that compared Oklahoma’s initiative process to other states in the nation. They found that Oklahoma consistently requires more signatures and shorter time frames for gathering them than surrounding states.

(ask any voter who’s had to navigate a host of such questions on Election Day)

How about instead of asking the voters, who may not know if a question got there via initiative petition or not, and ask the State Legislature that in reality fills the ballot with questions. This past election had a remarkable three questions on it. All three were put there by the Legislature. 2012 saw six state questions, all put there by the Legislature. 2010 had an astounding ten questions, only one of which was via initiative petition. That particular one only made it because it was funded by national teachers unions, who are very wealthy and quite skilled in petitioning. So AG Pruitt, what was that you said about the ease of getting a question on the ballot?

a recent well-funded and well-organized effort to get a marijuana legalization question on the ballot managed to garner a meager 75,000 signatures — less than half the number needed, and a number that equates to less than 2 percent of Oklahoma’s population.

Now, let’s be clear here. I do not know a lot about the actual organizations who ran the two marijuana petitions this year. But from all accounts, neither one was very well organized or funded. Both were run by novice petition organizers and did not have the roughly $1 million needed to successfully run a petition drive in such a short time span.

But on to the real meat of this chunk. This particular petition drive he refers to gathered 75,000 signatures. He talks about how this is somehow impressive. However, he is referring to raw signatures, not valid signatures. The Secretary of State’s office does not validate signatures unless the number turned in meets or exceeds the required number. According to the Secretary of State’s rules, if a petition is challenged, the signatures collected will be validated. (thanks to Norma Sapp for the correction)Generally, between 30 and 50% of signatures will be invalidated in one way or another. So these 75,000 signatures would have likely ended up as many as 50,000 and as few as 40,000 valid signatures. That is a lot further from the required goal than Pruitt leads on.

In other words, Oklahoma’s people have spoken loud and clear: They believe marijuana to be a harmful drug that shouldn’t be legal in any circumstance.

Here AG Pruitt makes the mistake of conflating petition response to actual voters at the polls. This is not at all an indication of the will of the people. Petitions can fail for a variety of reasons but it is not until a petition succeeds and makes it on the ballot that the voice of the people is actually heard. That did not happen in this case. The people of Oklahoma never got the chance to vote on the issue.

So with this much disinformation in a single quote, it is clear that those seeking to reform Oklahoma’s petitioning requirements will not find an ally in our Attorney General.

Major News Outlets Coming Out Against Oklahoma’s Petitioning Process

This year, three citizen initiative petitions kicked off to change Oklahoma’s laws. Two dealt with legalization of marijuana while the third dealt with school storm shelter funding. All three had a lot of support behind them, but all fell short of their signature goals.

In what is a clear consensus from supporters and observers of the petitioning process, the problem lies in the actual process itself. Oklahoma has some very strict rules regulating the petitioning process. We have seen and reported on this in regards to political parties for a while, but the problem doesn’t end there.

Oklahoma has three types of initiative petitions that allow citizens to get a question on the ballot, one to get an Constitutional Amendment on the ballot, one to amend state statute, and one as a referendum on legislation passed in the previous session. The signature requirements for each of these is a percentage of the last gubernatorial election, 15% for a constitutional amendment, 8% for a statute, and 5% for a referendum. But very few petitions are able to make it to the ballot.

In a report on the failure of this years petitions, News 9 of OKC wrote a comparison of Oklahoma’s petitioning laws and those of surrounding states, finding Oklahoma’s rules far more difficult.

Both Take Shelter Oklahoma and Medical Marijuana were initiatives for Constitutional Change. In Oklahoma that requires 15% of the gubernatorial vote, or just over 155,000 signatures, collected in 90 days.

Texas requires 10% of the vote collected in 180 days.

Arkansas requires 10% or 78,000 signatures to be collected in a time frame that’s unlimited.

Missouri requires 8% or about 157,000 signatures and the time frame varies but it could be up to 17 months.

Colorado asks for 5% of the total votes cast for the Secretary of State which is just over 86,000 signatures which must be collected six months.

The report also alludes to the need to change the rules, with comments from both Democratic Governor Nominee Joe Dorman and Governor Mary Fallin.

Additionally, The Oklahoman published an editorial in direct support for changing the process.

In Oklahoma, efforts to amend the state constitution require petition backers to gather signatures equal to 15 percent of the turnout for the last gubernatorial election — in this case, about 155,000 signatures. And they have just 90 days to gather them, the second-shortest period in the United States.

That’s too steep a hill to climb, as history shows. The only three statewide initiatives that have gotten to the ballot in the past 15 years sought to outlaw cockfighting (approved by voters in 2002), increase the state’s gasoline tax (rejected in 2005) and pump hundreds of millions of additional dollars into common education (rejected in 2010).

Six years ago Kent Meyers, a veteran Oklahoma City attorney with vast experience involving initiative petitions, told us he was concerned the process was becoming “inaccessible, except to the very few.” He was talking about the costs involved — groups can easily spend in excess of $2 million trying to get a petition from start to finish.

The last time the petitioning process was altered was in 2010, when a state question was posed to remove the presidential elections from the calculation. While this added a stabilizing effect to the number of signatures needed, it failed to address the two largest issues, the shear number of signatures needed and the minimal amount of time supporters have to gather them.

Just as Oklahoma’s party petitioning laws need to change to make the process easier, so does Oklahoma’s initiative petition process. We support a decrease in the number of signatures needed and an increase in the time allotted to gather them. Based on discussions with those who follow this process, one good suggestion is to decrease the signatures needed by half and increase the time to at least 12 months. This makes the process much easier and less reliant on wealthy special interests, while still acting as a buffer on less serious petitions.