Citizens in Charge

One of Utah’s largest papers, the Deseret News, has editorialized against the state’s highly restrictive distribution requirement. The paper correctly points out that such requirements severely hamper grassroots petition efforts:

[the requirement that signatures come from 26 of 29 state Senate districts], upheld by the Utah Supreme Court in 2004, appears to guarantee one of two outcomes: that citizen backers of initiatives cannot meet the threshold or that special interest organizations back efforts to pay workers to collect the needed signatures. Neither encourages true grass-roots, citizen involvement.

Deseret News goes on to list several good examples, and ends saying:

These events suggest that the bar may be too high for authentic, grass-roots movements to place issues on Utah’s ballot. Although the Supreme Court says the law is constitutional, it clearly puts ordinary citizens at an extreme disadvantage in collecting sufficient names or, worse, encourages special interests to hijack the process.

…The greater danger is setting the bar so high that citizens are effectively squeezed out of this means to place important issues on the Utah ballot.

We agree completely.