Citizens in Charge

Utah has suddenly exploded with initiative & referendum related news. You may recall last year we held a joint press conference with Utahns for Ethical Government as they attempted to defend their right to put a measure on the ballot. They are still trying to get their ethics commission measure on the ballot and it seems that the Utah Legislature and Governor are doing everything they can to stop it. To the courts we go:

A Utah public interest group sued the state Monday, claiming an ethics initiative is being illegally kept off the November 2012 ballot even though the group says enough signatures have been gathered to qualify it for inclusion.

Utahns for Ethical Government aims to force state elections officials to certify the signatures that officials have so far refused to do.

The group began collecting signatures in August 2009 to push the initiative that would create an independent ethics commission for legislators and other government officials, require fuller disclosure of potential conflicts of interest and prohibit transfers of campaign funds, among other things.

They initially wanted it on the November 2010 ballot, but state officials said at the time they didn’t have enough signatures to qualify. The group then began collecting more signatures in an effort to get their initiative on the 2012 ballot.

About 95,000 signatures are needed, and Utahns for Ethical Government attorney David Irvine said the group had almost 120,000 signatures by August 2010, within a year after they first began collecting them.

Irvine contends state law allows for a one year period to collect signatures in order to be certified for the ballot, but the state elections office has refused to consider all of the signatures collected in that time span.

State elections administrator Mark Thomas said the group cannot carry over signatures from a previous year, that the signatures must be gathered for a specific ballot within a single year, meaning the group must begin the entire process of gathering signatures again.

Also in Utah, a battle for e-signatures and the public’s right to know what their elected officials are up to…

Last year Utah’s Supreme Court ruled that e-signatures to be valid, thus making it easier to candidates to petition to get on the ballot. Eventually, citizens would be able to use e-signatures to more easily place initiatives and referenda on the ballot as well.

The Utah Legislature decided that they were not going to play nice on the e-signature revolution and passed a bill (SB 165) denies citizens the right to use e-signatures in their petition campaigns. It’s a strange juxtaposition…the state’s highest court is encouraging citizens to develop technology to more effectively utilize their rights while the state legislature bristles at the thought of citizens having more of a voice. How dare the encroach on the legislature’s power! Utah’s governor signed the bill into law a few days ago.

The timing of SB 165 is interesting as well. The Utah legislature just passed and the governor sign into law HB 477, a bill that protects legislators emails and text messages from Freedom of Information Act requests. Naturally, Utah citizens are a bit upset that their elected representatives voted to further insulate themselves from public scrutiny. Opponents of HB 477 filed paperwork to put a referendum on the ballot to overturn the law and have 40 days to collect thousands of signatures. Their task will be more difficult now of course, thanks to SB 165 being signed into law and e-signatures no longer a legal method of signature gathering.

How convenient for the legislature…

You can watch a news story of all the events leading up to this here.