It’s often one of life’s annoyances in California: you walk into
a store or out of one and a petition carrier accosts you, seeking
signatures for some cause. Generally, you have no idea who the
petition carrier is or even what the petition is about. All you
know is he or she is in your face.
It’s often one of life’s annoyances in California: you walk into a store or out of one and a petition carrier accosts you, seeking signatures for some cause. Generally, you have no idea who the petition carrier is or even what the petition is about. All you know is he or she is in your face.
And then there’s the result: Voters had a bit of a break from the initiative flood this spring, with only one such measure on the primary election ballot. But that hiatus ends in November, when the ballot will feature eight initiatives covering wildly different subject matter, along with $46 billion worth of state bond and tax increase propositions.
Now comes Democratic Assemblywoman Jenny Oropeza of Long Beach with what she believes is a correction. Her bill requiring California residency – and even residency in the county where they’re working – for people who collect signatures on petitions to place initiatives on the statewide ballot has already passed the Assembly and will likely have little trouble in the state Senate later this summer.
It’s unknown whether Republican Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger will sign it, as many Republicans believe this measure aims to make it more difficult for conservative interest groups and business lobbies to qualify their pet measures for a vote. The Republican reasoning:Â Labor unions have less trouble putting volunteers in the field to carry petitions for free, so any restrictions on the carriers would favor leftist causes.
That may or may not be true. For sure, petition carrying has become a significant industry. Several companies that specialize in qualifying proposals for the ballot now pay carriers as much as $1.50 for each valid voter signature they gather.
Most initiative sponsors believe that to get the required number of valid signatures needed to put either a normal law or a constitutional amendment on the ballot, they must present far more than the minimum signatures to state and county authorities. More than 1 million were submitted for Proposition 82, the preschool initiative on the June ballot.
This means qualifying an initiative costs at least $1.5 million unless there’s an unusual groundswell bringing out thousands of volunteer carriers, a reality that has spurred calls for reform because it seems to put the initiative movement primarily in the hands of big-money interests.
The money involved has also created a cadre of carriers who travel from state to state like bounty hunters, clipboards at the ready. Oropeza wants to put the clamps on them, making it harder for special interests to put their wishes on the ballot.
This device was tried once before, when legislators passed rules in the 1980s also demanding that all carriers be California residents. The law did not last because the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that it interfered with interstate commerce and the freedom of movement by citizens over state lines.
A similar move was attempted in the late 1990s, when the city of Monterey attempted to require that circulators of local initiative petitions be residents of the city. But a 1999 legal opinion by Attorney General Bill Lockyer quashed that city code section as unconstitutional. It would, the opinion said, “impose a burden on core political speech” by reducing “the number of voices who will convey (a) message.”
In short, the strong likelihood is that today’s effort by Oropeza likely would not pass legal muster, even if it gets out of the Legislature and the governor signs it.
Which means that those seeking either initiative reform or to relieve shoppers of being pestered will have to try something else.
How about a law rendering any petition signature invalid if the carrier was paid for gathering it? A law like that would be akin to existing ones that forbid payment for actual votes. In some ways, petition signatures are even more influential than real votes, since they determine which issues will be considered at election time.
Payment for signatures, then, can be interpreted as every bit as corrupt as buying votes.
Of course, such a measure would have little chance of passing either house of the state Legislature, as the same special interests that now fund election campaigns for politicians of all stripes often put paid petition circulators on the streets and in the shopping malls.
Which means that campaign donations are the real rub, the true polluter of politics, much more than the relative pittances paid to petition carriers.
Thomas Elias is a syndicated columnist and the author of several books on politics.
