Changing the Petition Rules

A Colorado case now under review by the U.S. Supreme Court will be of considerable interest to Californians, for it could have an effect down the road on how groups gather signatures for initiative petition campaigns. With more than 30 initiatives either on the ballot or trying to get there in 1988, virtually any ruling on this issue will have considerable following in California.

In California, with 372,145 signatures required for an initiative statute and 505,485 for a constitutional amendment, most successful campaigns have to hire professional petition circulators. But Colorado, along with Washington and Oregon, has a law banning payment to those who carry petitions around seeking signatures. A group seeking deregulation of the trucking industry in Colorado challenged the law in federal district court and lost, and lost again in appealing to a three-member panel of the 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. But the ruling was overturned 6 to 2 when it was considered by the full 10th Circuit Court. The state has appealed that ruling to the Supreme Court, seeking to have its ban on paid circulators upheld.

The appellate court rightly held that a total ban on professional petition-circulators violates free speech and other rights guaranteed by the Constitution. Such a ban, the court said, “impedes the sponsors’ opportunity to disseminate their views to the public.” Further, the court said that the state has considerable authority to restrict and police the circulation of petitions, short of an outright ban on paid circulators.

The proliferation of initiatives has caused considerable concern in California and has spawned reform proposals, because virtually any well-heeled interest can get its issue onto the ballot with enough paid petition carriers. In a 1985 study of the initiative, Larry L. Berg and C. B. Holman of the University of Southern California Institute of Politics and Government wrote: “The more an initiative is organized and managed by professional firms, the less it is a product of concerned citizens and volunteers tapping a popular sentiment. Instead, the initiative process tends to become an instrument of the same special interests it was once originally intended to control.”

There are some compromise measures that should be considered in order to reduce the effect of pure money in the initiative process and to ensure that there is indeed some grass-roots support for an issue that is involved in a campaign. One measure would be to require the initiative campaign to meet a geographic test in its signature gathering, requiring a certain number of signatures from a certain number of counties to ensure a representative sampling of the state’s voting population. At present there is no restriction whatever, and if a campaign wanted to it could get all of its signatures from Los Angeles County, or in the San Francisco Bay area. Another change might be to require that some proportion of signatures be collected by volunteers. And there certainly should be greater disclosure about which interests are promoting petitions.

The initiative is a valuable safety valve in a democracy. But the modern era of big-money politics requires a closer look at the process in California.