Citizens in Charge

We’ve previously blogged about the attempts out in Washington state to make public the names and information of citizens who sign petitions. Unfortunately, that may be happening here in Northern Virginia as well. This article in the Sun Gazette newspaper explains how in Arlington, VA the petition signatures are public record if requested.

The nation’s highest court will decide by January 11 if they will hear arguments in Doe v. Reed, according to the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. The case hinges on whether signatures on a referendum petition fall under the state’s public records disclosure law.

Last week, as I was writing about some of the ways the peoples’ voice is silenced, the St. Louis, Missouri police were busy silencing Gustavo Rendon by taking away his first amendment right to free speech.

Howard County Citizens for Open Government are this month’s Lilburne Award Honorees. This group of citizens from Howard County, Maryland is currently working to protect their first amendment petitioning rights which were restricted by the Howard County Board of Elections earlier this year. To read more about the group and their case go here.

Never short on examples of the many attempts around the country to take away the peoples’ right to initiative and referendum by gutting the process, Norfolk, VA residents narrowly escaped a doubling of the signature requirement to put measures on the city ballot Wednesday.  Thanks to the strong opposition shown by tho

Last month, Ohio state representative Jennifer Garrison announced a plan for what she inappropriately refers to as a “Ballot Integrity Act”. The proposal would require people who help initiative and referendum campaigns collect signatures, and the companies they work for, to go through an onerous and potentially expensive registration process before they could work on a petition campaign.The law would also allow voters’ signatures to be thrown out because of mistakes made by campaign workers.

After blogging yesterday about some of the petty ways initiative opponents try to block people from excercising their voting rights by throwing out their signatures on a petition, I started thinking about the wider struggle to protect those rights. Special interests and many politicians simply don’t like the initiative process because it threatens their hold on power. The last thing they want is for you, the voter, to have a say in how their government is run.

Richard Winger at Ballot Access News uses a situation in Maine to make a great point about the many and often absurd reasons that petition signatures can be challenged around the country:

We blogged previously about the petition in Denver, CO to get a measure on the ballot to create a UFO Commission. Yesterday, the petition signatures were finally validated and accepted, and voters will weigh in on the issue next year.

The effort to get this measure on the ballot began in April of 2008 and attracted attention from around the world. This is the first serious effort to use the initiative process for this topic.