Citizens in Charge

Oklahoma Senate Bill 800 was signed into law by Gov. Brad Henry yesterday. The bill will move challenges to the ballot wording (“gist statement”) to before signatures are collected rather than after. This will prevent ballot initiative petitions from being thrown out due to minor technicalities after the hard work of gathering signatures has been done.

This is one of three bills in Oklahoma aimed at opening up acess to the state’s ballot initiative process. You can read about all three here. One bill, HB 2246, still has yet to be acted on by the governor. That bill will expand the 90 day period to gather signatures to one year.

Oklahoma currently has the second shortest period to circulate petitions, only Massachusettes is shorter with 63 days. Massachusettes, however, only requires signatures of 3% of voters in the last election, versus 15% in Oklahoma; also among the highest in the nation.