California’s Toxic Initiative and Signature Gathering Process

As we have read on this blog, Prop. 16 is backed by a big money energy firm (PG&E) that used paid professional signature gatherers to qualify the initiative for the ballot and is now bankrolling a blitz of TV, radio and printed media advertisements encouraging a yes vote. Prop. 17 is similarly bankrolled by Mercury Insurance Company.

Grass roots efforts to qualify two initiatives – one dealing with public employee pensions and the other with birth certificates of anchor babies – failed to succeed in gaining enough signatures to qualify for the ballot. Backers say they will try again, this time turning to paid signature gatherers to collect the necessary signatures (assuming the backers can raise enough money to hire paid signature gatherers).

The Orange County Register on Sunday, April 18, in a front page story titled “Petitioners apply dubious tactics to lift GOP rolls” reported that signature gatherers were misleading people into signing forms to register to vote as Republicans and being paid $8 for every such registration. That article describes a litany of misleading trickery to get such signatures. Perhaps the most amusing thing in that story is that when a reporter tracked down one young person who had signed up with one of these paid signature gatherers, the response after being told they were registered as a Republican was “what’s a Republican?”.

The very next day, April 19, the Register’s Martin Wisckol’s column is headlined “Citizen initiatives don’t’ come free.” His column begins by stating that anyone wanting to qualify an initiative for the ballot will have to raise a million dollars to hire professional signature gatherers. He then recites several efforts in past years that failed by trying to do it without raising the big bucks needed to hire signature gatherers.

So, there you have it. It seems to take big money to get an initiative on the ballot. Grass roots movements need to raise funds to do it (hiring professional fund raisers, no doubt). Self-serving special interests with a lot of money can do it. A whole industry of signature gathering “professionals” has sprung up to hire-on to get those signatures. There are numerous anecdotal stories about signature gatherers using misleading information and tactics to gain signatures.

This whole situation stinks.

About Over But Not Out

A retired Orange County employee, and moderate Republican. The editor seriously does not know OBNO's identity as did not the former editor, but his point of view is obviously interesting and valued.