California’s AB 857 on Governor’s desk…waiting
The skirmish over the anti-initiative Assembly Bill 857 will reach a climax very soon, as California governor Jerry Brown is set to either sign or veto the bill within a week’s time.
The bill would place a restriction on all petition signature-gathering efforts, requiring 10% of the total verified signatures be collected by volunteers. This would mean more than 50,000 signatures would need to be gathered if a petition’s requirement was based on the last gubernatorial election (which puts the total requirement at just over 500,000).
A sneaky caveat that this bill includes however, is an exemption to the signature-gathering restriction for non-profit entities such as organized labor groups, which allows their employees and members to collect signatures as “volunteers.” This could give these organizations an unfair advantage over other campaigns that have smaller coffers to pay petitioners.
Contact Jerry Brown’s office to voice your opinion and ask him to veto AB 857.
http://gov.ca.gov/m_contact.php
More from the Washington Post:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2013/10/02/california-considers-initiative-tweaks-that-would-favor-dems/
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