The initiative process is central to the political health of Oregon. Here are a few of the measures adopted by Oregon initiatives:

The opportunity for grass-roots efforts to qualify measures for the Oregon ballot has been severely impaired since 2000 by several factors, including these:

1. Expressly reversing its own precedents, the Oregon Supreme Court in late 2000 ruled that the Oregon Constitution does not guarantee petitioners access to any private property, including shopping center common areas or the parking lot entrances to stand-alone stores. Thus, the most productive places for petitioning are now out of bounds.

Petitioners do have the right to petition in such areas in other states with the initiative process, including California and Washington. All hell has yet to break loose in those states, and it did not break loose in Oregon before 2000. It is not necessary to amend the Oregon Constitution to reinstate the right of petitioners to gather signatures in these areas, subject to reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions. This can be done by statute, because it is clear that the merchants do not have a constitutional right to exclude petitioners.

As Secretary of State, will you support legislation to restore reasonable access to these areas for petitioning, under reasonable time, place, and manner restrictions?

2. Secretary of State Bradbury since mid-2004 has retroactively imposed a series of unwritten rules that have disqualified over 300,000 valid voter signatures on statewide initiative petitions. He first imposed these unwritten rules in May 2004, but they were not even adopted as rules until almost a year later. These complicated "rules" are particularly difficult for volunteer circulators to follow perfectly, and perfection is required.

One such "rule" is that the circulator's signature and date at the bottom of each sheet must be an unbroken, pristine flow of ink on paper. If it is June 1, and the circulator starts to write a "5" in the date field, then corrects it to a "6" and even initials the change, the entire sheet of signatures is discarded. Or if the circulator starts to print her name in her signature field, realizes the error after printing one letter and then crosses out that letter and inserts her signature, that entire sheet is also discarded. There are no means for these alleged "errors" to be corrected. Banks certainly accept checks that are written with such errors, but Bradbury find them so offensive that he discards entire sheets of valid voter signatures, if the circulator makes any slip of the pen.

Because of the lack of access to public spaces described above, volunteer efforts now focus primarily on collecting signatures by mail. But this has become prohibitively expensive, because a significant share of the signature sheets returned by volunteers have the clerical "errors" that disqualify the sheets. Some of the errors can be corrected by the circulator, but experience shows that the rules are so complex and counter-intuitive that even corrected sheets are still wrong.

As Secretary of State, will you stop Bradbury's war against the initiative process and count all valid voter signatures, even if the circulators make clerical "errors"?

Will you support legislation forbidding the Secretary of State from applying standards to signatures of voters and circulators more stringent than those required by banks on checks?

3. The Oregon Legislature in 2007 passed HB 2082, which makes the initiative process even more difficult for grassroots efforts. Here are some of its features:

1. It bans petitioners from clarifying printed voter names that are illegible in order to save the validity of that voter's signature when it is verified by the county clerk.

2. It requires that all signature sheets be alphabetized by the name of the circulator, for absolutely no reason. For campaigns that collect signatures by mail, one or two or three at a time, it means alphabetizing upwards of 60,000 sheets.

3. It requires signature drives to report their contributions and expenditures over 30 times (instead of the 4 times now required) but does not require opponents of the petition drive to ever report their contributions and expenditures. Ever.

4. It bans a campaign from sending out signature sheets in the mail with the voter's name and address already printed on it. So mailing preprinted sheets is OK for vote-by-mail but evil when it comes to petitioning.

5. It forbids vision-impaired people from collecting signatures by requiring that the circulator "witness" the signature instead of attesting that the petition was signed in her presence.

As Secretary of State, would you support the repeal of these onerous provisions?

As Secretary of State, would you support a law requiring opponents of a petition drive to report their contributions and expenditures in the same manner as the chief petitioners must report?

4. In Oregon, gathering signatures has sometimes devolved into street warfare, with paid and volunteer circulators confronted by gangs of paid "blockers" hired by opponents of the proposed measures to block citizens from signing the petitions and to harass the circulators. Such harassment has included paying uninvited visits to the homes of the circulators and warning them about the consequences of election law violations.
   As Secretary of State, will you prosecute "blockers" for interfering with the rights of circulators to communicate with other people about their issues?

Will you support adoption of any laws necessary to prevent "blockers" from harassing circulators or petition signers?

5. We could avoid the street warfare, shopping center struggles, and fights over alleged clerical errors by adopting what we call the "Initiative Primary": If the chief petitioners on a statewide petition do early submission of a number of signatures equal to, say, 20% of the total number required, then the Secretary of State would print in the primary election statewide voters' pamphlet the full ballot title of the petition. The primary ballot would include a list of the proposed measures which have met this threshold, a voter could affix her signature to the petition by filling in the oval on the ballot next to its ballot title caption. This would save time and money, since the signatures of voters on their ballot internal envelopes are already authenticated by elections officials as part of the voting process.

As Secretary of State, will you support the adoption of the "Initiative Primary"?

6. The quality of petition signature verification by the county elections offices ranges from good to atrocious. We have also learned that election workers on the counties and at the Secretary of State's office are not qualified to judge whether variations in a person's signature are normal or indicate forgery.

As Secretary of State, will you support legislation to shift the verification on all petition signatures to the Office of the Secretary of State?

Will you hire a qualified professional forensic handwriting expert to advise on whether allegedly questionable signatures are valid?

COALITION FOR INITIATIVE RIGHTS

The Coalition for Initiative Rights is 20-year old association of individuals who seek to protect the rights of Oregonians to use the initiative, referendum, and recall processes and to nominate candidates by means of petitioning. We believe that the use of petitioning to place both issues and candidates on the ballot is essential to democracy. We oppose unnecessary restrictions on petitioning. We participate in the election process, before legislatures, and in court to protect these processes.