Nader Initiative Reports Surge in Signatures

Coordinators of the proposed “Voter Revolt” insurance initiative backed by consumer advocate Ralph Nader said Monday that a surge of new petition signatures has given them confidence that they will be able to qualify their measure for the November ballot after all.

Campaign officials Bill Zimmerman and Harvey Rosenfield said that as of Monday, 496,000 signatures had been sorted for submission to county clerks and that signatures are arriving at a rate that should allow them to reach a goal of 525,000 next week.

Nader’s initiative is the only one of five ballot proposals primarily directed at cutting auto insurance rates that is not funded by either insurance or trial-lawyer interests. The initiative would roll back auto insurance and other liability rates by 20% and later give good drivers a permanent 20% discount. It also would institute state rate regulation and mandate popular election of the insurance commissioner.

Just two weeks ago, the coordinators described themselves as being in a “desperate situation,” 100,000 signatures short of what they would need. At that time, they said that unless they raised $50,000 to pay professional petition circulators their chances of getting the needed signatures would be low.

However, since then they reported that even though they had raised only $20,000, about 38,000 signatures have come in from an earlier mail campaign and that 32,000 have been collected on the streets.

Although only 372,178 signatures are required to make the ballot, they must be from registered voters, and quite a few are usually found to be invalid. Circulators usually prefer to submit 600,000 or more signatures, and two professional circulators whose opinions were solicited Monday expressed doubt that the 525,000 Zimmerman and Rosenfield expect to have will be enough.

Zimmerman, however, noted that most of the signatures the Voter Revolt organization has collected came from returns to mail that went to registered voters, so he said he feels that their validity rate will be high.