May 4, 2009 12:00 PM
Earlier I wrote about the legislature's unconstitutional efforts to diminish the petition power of Missourians.
Much has changed in the past few hours.
Rep. Parson has agreed to have his HB 228 language substituted with that of SB 569, authored by Senator Jim Lembke (R-1). That is good news.
Despite the hang-wringing of legislators and well-connected lobbyists about the petition process, there are legitimate steps the legislature can take to make sure that Missouri statutes confirm with the spirit of the constitution. For example, due to poorly constructed statutes pertaining to the petition process, the Secretary of State has a de facto veto over any petition. In 2006, Secretary of State Robin Carnahan was twice ruled to have been incompetent at developing ballot titles—descriptions of the initiative that would appear on the ballot. As a result, and through no fault of the petitioners or the voters, tens of thousands of voter signatures were disenfranchised. The reason is that any signatures gathered under a faulty ballot title are disregarded. (Mind you, the ballot title is just the description of the petition, not the petition itself.)
If petition circulators choose to wait until all legal challenges to the ballot title are decided, they risk losing valuable weeks to collect signatures. Through incompetence or corruption any Missouri Secretary of State can simply run out the clock on a petition. This is anathema to having a petition process in the first place.
Another obstacle is the Secretary of State’s broad power to determine which petitions count and why. In 2006, Secretary Carnahan chose to read these provisions to mean that she could dismiss tens of thousands of petitions if a small percentage of them were sorted incorrectly. (In our case, only 3% of eminent domain petitions had been filed incorrectly.) These are petitions where the voters’ have placed their name, address and signature on paper in plain view. Their intent is clear.
Sen. Lembke's bill limits the amount of time that petitions can be held up by litigation, does not penalize voters for the mistakes made by other people, and puts limits on the amount of time the Secretary of State and State Auditor may take to develop titles. (Full disclosure: this author was involved in developing the principles behind SB569.)
In hearings before the senate elections committee, the office of the Secretary of State testified for informational purposes on Lembke’s bill. Part of their testimony was that the initiative process was important and therefore should be difficult. Certainly Missourians should not endorse changing their constitution willy-nilly. But on the constitutional campaigns on which I have worked, gathering signatures was the easiest part of the process. The real obstacles presented were from state officers, special interests and the legal challenges and red tape they were able to bring to bear.
It is important to reflect on the words of Article 3, Section 49 of our state constitution, “the people reserve power to propose and enact or reject laws and amendments to the constitution by the initiative, independent of the general assembly…” The petition process is not a privilege granted to us by our government masters, it is a right of the people never ceded to the legislature in the first place.
The Missouri House and Senate ought to respect this, and work to make sure that power is returned to the people.
Patrick Tuohey is president of Market and Communications Research Inc., a public opinion and communication research firm he founded in 1999. He and his wife Michelle live in Kansas City, Missouri with their three daughters.
Rep. Parson has agreed to have his HB 228 language substituted with that of SB569, authored by Senator Jim Lembke (R-1). That is good news.
