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I support Initiative 517 because I am a strong believer in our initiative rights which our state has had for over a century. Our right to initiative and petition our government is the most important tool we have to push back when government does things we don’t like.
Initiative 517’s primary policy change is guaranteeing you the right to vote on qualified initiatives.
In a recent unanimous ruling, the Washington State Supreme Court rejected an effort by special interest groups to stop the people from voting on a qualified initiative. The court’s reason: “Because ballot measures are often used to express popular will and to send a message to elected representatives, pre-election review unduly infringes on free speech.”
Our right to initiative and petition our government is the most important tool we have to push back when government does things we don’t like.
I am Sen. Ann Rivers and I support Initiative 517 because I am a strong believer in our initiative rights which our state has had for more than a century. Initiative 517’s primary policy change is guaranteeing you the right to vote on qualified initiatives.
In a unanimous ruling, the Washington State Supreme Court in 2005 rejected an effort by special interest groups to stop the people from voting on a qualified initiative. Their reason: “Because ballot measures are often used to express popular will and to send a message to elected representatives, pre-election review unduly infringes on free speech.”
A referendum campaign to overturn an Ohio Internet-sweepstakes-cafe law appears to have fizzled, but backers may not know for sure until today.
The Committee to Protect Ohio Jobs stopped collecting signatures on an updated referendum petition yesterday and began taking inventory of what already had been gathered, spokesman Mark Weaver said.
Asked whether the committee will file with Secretary of State Jon Husted’s office by today’s deadline, Weaver said, “If we have enough (signatures), we’ll file. If we don’t, we won’t.”
Read More: here
A lawsuit challenging the petition-gathering process that got a $950 million school-tax proposal on the November ballot was filed late Wednesday, according to a group opposing the measure.
The group, Coloradans for Real Education Reform, said Bob Hagedorn, a former Democratic state senator from Aurora, and Norma Anderson, a former Republican lawmaker from Lakewood, filed the suit in Denver District Court claiming that 39,555 of the signatures gathered for the ballot measure are invalid.
Read more:here
The Washington Post’s Reid Wilson reports on a bill passed by the Assembly and Senate that Gov. Jerry Brown may sign this week:
Read More: here
California Gov. Jerry Brown has about a week and a half to decide whether to sign or veto legislation that would put substantial burdens on groups aiming to collect signatures for ballot initiatives, while exempting unions from the stringent new rules.
The measure, Assembly Bill 857, would require 10 percent of signatures for any given ballot initiative to be collected by volunteers, rather than by paid signature gatherers. The number of signatures supporters need to turn in is based on the number of votes in the last gubernatorial election; that means groups would have to rely on volunteers to gather a little more than 50,000 of the 504,760 valid signatures required to get an initiative on the ballot.
One initiative on the November ballot would guarante the right to vote on qualified initiatives — I-517. It’s an initiative on initiatives if you will. I believe the right of initiative, and to petition our government to change things when it takes actions we don’t agree with, is the single most important tool citizens have to force our state government to listen to us. They’ve proven over and over again, that no matter what we think, they believe they know what’s best for us down there in Olympia. The initiative process is one of the few ways citizens have to keep the tax-and-spend zealots in check.
Read More: here
In November the people of Washington will vote on Initiative 517. The measure would make several changes to state law concerning signature gathering for initiatives and referendums. Initiative 517 would increase the time period for gathering signatures, require proposals that receive an adequate number of valid signatures to proceed to the ballot, change the penalties for interfering with signature gathering, and increase the number of locations, both public and private, where signature gathering can occur.
Read more: here
It’s not every day that you come across an issue that unites the Cincinnati AFL-CIO Labor Council and the Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber.
Nor are there many issues on which the two Democratic candidates for Cincinnati mayor, John Cranley and Roxanne Qualls, agree.
But Issue 4, the tea party-backed charter amendment that will be on the Nov. 5 ballot, is one of them.
A group of Cincinnatians who call themselves Cincinnati For Pension Reform – some of them tea party activists – mounted a successful petition drive to put Issue 4, which would essentially switch city employees to a 401K system, on the ballot.
Read More: here
The referendum drive against an elections bill passed by the Legislature in June will have a tough standard to meet if it goes to court.
Referendums in Arizona are subject to a judicial standard known as strict compliance, which requires absolute adherence to the letter of the law. Initiatives and recalls, on the other hand, have historically been held to a standard called substantial compliance, which allows more leeway for technical errors.
Maricopa County Elections Director Karen Osborne said the higher standard has little effect on the examination of signatures by her office. The county generally uses a high standard when it conducts its analysis of signatures for initiatives, referendums and recalls alike.