Initiative Law Setback

Who hasn’t been accosted outside a supermarket by clipboard-waving petition floggers seeking signatures to put another initiative on the California ballot? “Want to save the whales?” “Cut your taxes?” But in reality the small print might say something altogether different. The high number of initiatives that make it onto the ballot attests to the success of the clipboard brigades, but the wholesale use of paid petition circulators in recent years has prompted calls for reform.

Now, any prospect of tightening the rules on professional petition gatherers has been effectively squelched by the U.S. Supreme Court in a decision that struck down Colorado laws requiring petition circulators to wear name badges and be registered voters and that their pay be reported to state officials. The initiative process constitutes “core political speech” and is protected by the 1st Amendment from undue state regulation, the court held in an opinion written by Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg. If, as is possible, California’s similar laws are challenged, they would be expected to fall.

California law includes two of the invalidated Colorado provisions: that petition circulators be registered to vote in the state and that petition campaigns report all expenditures to the state. We oppose any limits on the public’s ability to find out just which special interests may be bankrolling a petition drive. By granting the status of political expression to the petition circulation process, the court has made it more difficult for the state to impose disclosure requirements and thus easier for petition sponsors to conceal the sources of their funds.

We also believe it is reasonable for the state to decree that circulators be registered voters, a status that gives them at least a minimal personal stake in the process. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, in a rare dissenting opinion, said the same. We share his concern that the ruling “threatens to invalidate a whole host of historically established regulations of the electoral process in general.” The high court always has given the states considerable latitude in setting their own election rules, which makes this decision an odd exception.

Many Californians are disgusted by the free-spending special interests that skew the political process through initiative campaigns, but they also are reluctant to limit their own ability to right wrongs through the ballot box. The state’s rules balancing these opposing impulses make sense; the Supreme Court’s action in striking down similar ones in Colorado does not. If California’s rules indeed are voided, then the Legislature should try to craft new ones that can survive a court test.