Newswire
Los Angeles-based Love Honor Cherish carried out a volunteer-driven signature-gathering effort after large groups decided there was not enough time to ensure victory this year, even with some polls showing more than 50 percent support for same-sex marriage. A 150-day period to gather signatures to place the question on the ballot ended on Monday. Courts and state legislatures have legalized same-sex marriage in five U.S. states and the District of Columbia, but popular votes have always rejected such unions, which are illegal in the vast majority of U.S. states.
Some say changing the culture of corruption in Illinois will require changing the way the state draw legislative districts. Monday night a state Senate committee approved a constitutional amendment that would do that, but it’s not the change for which many reformers had hoped. A citizen group is hoping they’ve gathered enough signatures to put their plan on the November ballot instead.
State lawmakers may once again ask voters to make it harder to get constitutional amendments on the ballot, an idea Coloradans rejected in 2008, The Denver Post reports. This time, though, there may be no attempt to encourage groups circulating initiative petitions to only change state statutes instead of the constitution. “This is a simplified Ref. O,” said Sen. Abel Tapia, D-Pueblo, referring to Referendum O, which voters shot down 52.5 percent to 47.5 percent in 2008.
The birth records of adoptions finalized in Denver would become available to the adoptees, once they are adults, under a proposed ballot initiative. Adoptees in Search ”” the Colorado Triad Connection will hold a “review and comment” session on Friday with City Council staff and the city attorney’s office about the proposed ballot measure. The group ”” with about 1,000 members, mostly adoptees but also birth parents and adoptive parents ”” hopes to persuade voters to pass an ordinance allowing the adoptees “equal, direct and unrestricted access” to their birth records.
California’s 99-year-old initiative process has earned a B-plus grade in a 2010 scorecard that rates the access voters have across the country for placing measures on the ballot. California was one of three states to receive a B-plus grade from the Citizens in Charge Foundation, which supports the expansion of the initiative and referendum process. Just two states, Ohio and Missouri, scored an A-minus, the highest grade given.
You now have until April 17th to take off these studded tires, meanwhile an Oregon man is heading an initiative to make sure they never come back on. Jeff Bernards is in Bend this week, he wants to put a studded tire ban on the 2012 ballot. “Our State is in trouble financially and I think it’s a small sacrifice to ask that handful of people to forgo studded tire use,” said Bernards.
California lawmakers on Monday endorsed raising the fee to file a ballot initiative, despite concerns that doing so would limit the ability of individuals to put their ideas before voters. The state Assembly voted mostly along partisan lines, 43-22, to raise the filing fee over a six-year period from $200 to $2,000. If the legislation becomes law, it will be the first time the fee is raised since it was imposed in 1943.
Attorney General Dustin McDaniel deals a blow to a group of local health care reform protesters. McDaniel rejected a proposed ballot initiative Tuesday that sought to prohibit the new federal health care law. McDaniel rejected a similar initiative from the same group, Secure Arkansas, in February.
The Senate yesterday voted in favor of sending only a proposal to develop a casino in Oxford County to voters in November. The 26-8 vote effectively kills a proposal to put a three-part question on the ballot that would have allowed voters to approve the Oxford casino, a casino in Washington County run by the Passamaquoddy Tribe and table games at Hollywood Slots in Bangor, according to the Sun Journal. The House voted similarly on Friday.
Columbia voters have endorsed a plan to put in downtown surveillance cameras to address concerns about rising crime. Unofficial returns from Tuesday’s city election show that the initiative petition started by the mother of an assault victim won the support of 59 percent of voters. The ballot measure known as Proposition 1 won by a margin of more than 3,300 votes.