"Sizemore said he can't produce those copies, and thus he can't continue to collect signatures on several key measures"

Sweet! Looks to me like those initiatives won't have a chance to make the ballot if he can't produce the required paperwork.

Sweet! Looks to me like those initiatives won't have a chance to make the ballot if he can't produce the required paperwork.

Or we'll see a court challenge that the 2007 law is an unconstitutional restriction on the petition process. I'm betting on the latter.

Sure, maybe we'll see a court challenge, but it'll keep things on hold for a while, especially if they aren't able to gather signatures in the interim, which pretty much means they won't be on the ballot, at least not this year.

And those laws are on the books in many states, it's unlikely they'd be overturned.

If this action is upheld, it may be the end days for ole Bill Sizemore.

"those initiatives won't have a chance to make the ballot"

Or any iniatives for that matter. I am unclear on what anyone has against something as democratic as the initiative process.

NO - I am not asking for a public vote on everything, so please avoid that red herring. If someone can get 100K+ signatures to allow the public to vote on an issue, why not?

"If someone can get 100K+ signatures to allow the public to vote on an issue, why not?"

If they do that following the law, that's fine. But back in the 1990s there were jokes that Buffalo Bill Seizemore thought himself the King of Sizemoregon.

The original initiative, referendum, and recall were volunteer efforts--a court later ruled that paid petitioners were legal. Then laws and court decisions were passed regulating petitioner behavior: where they could petition (it was getting hard to get into some stores without being harassed), enforcing the single subject rule, outlawing pay per signature.

To the extent Sizemore didn't follow those regulations (mostly seeking to put measures on the ballot again after they had already failed previously), I'm glad he had the proverbial book thrown at him. Many of us who have had to be polite to the public and answer detailed questions had long wanted to see him have to go out in the real world and get a real job like the rest of us.

Yes, Bill, the rules which apply to others also apply to you.

Yes, it should be said that these regulations do not impede volunteer initiative and referendum efforts. They're designed to defeat the "lie, cheat, steal and buy your way onto the ballot" organizations that pushed initiatives and referenda with popular names and odious substance. To the extent that increased litigation and regulation of initiatives have impeded progressive measures, it's to a much lower extent. While I do hate to see any unnecessary impediments to direct democracy, today's measures seem to be better written and labeled. In the past, even progressive measures were often very poorly written. Witness the medical marijuana measure - it does a very bad job at delineating legal and illegal conduct because it's just written poorly.

"The original initiative, referendum, and recall were volunteer efforts"

I understand that, but then Mr Bradbury would find one bad signature on a sheet and disqualify a whole batch of signatures due to an amateur's honest mistake. One would think that politicians in this state dislike any iniatives.

I think they serve a purpose to act as a check on politicians who are out of tune with the population. I mean if we got a bunch of politicians who wanted to outlaw abortion, shouldn't someone have the right to circulate an iniative against this? Or would you rather wait and try to vote out a majority of politicians even if you were just against one piece of legislation?

No, Steve. Mr. Bradbury's staff would take a random sample of signatures, determine how many were invalid, and then use a proportional calculation to determine the number of bad signatures in the whole list.

Many Sizemore petitions, being gathered by people paid by the signature, were filled with bogus names the gatherer either made up or got out of the phone book. So they rightfully got tossed.

Your absurd accusation of partisanship not withstanding, Secretary of State Bradbury was enforcing the law and preventing voting fraud. The procedure used is taught in Statistics 101 courses. If you have problem with it, you are a mathematical dunce.

I thought that the Marion County Courts had already upheld the new law actually.

Evan, is that true? I'm not saying I don't believe you, but I find that very interesting. Can you post a link or reference?

Some of you miss the point entirely when you talk about "the law."

Sizemore has a good point about the constitutionality. Pity what our state Constitution says on this point isn't examined. From Article I (the Bill of Rights):

Section 26: "No law shall be passed restraining any of the inhabitants of the State from assembling together in a peaceable manner to consult for their common good; nor from instructing their Representatives; nor from applying to the Legislature for redress of greviances (sic).---"

Section 21: "No ex-post facto law, or law impairing the obligation of contracts shall ever be passed, nor shall any law be passed, the taking effect of which shall be made to depend upon any authority, except as provided in this Constitution ..."

26's "No law shall be passed restraining any of the inhabitants of the State from assembling together in a peaceable manner to consult for their common good; nor from instructing their Representatives ..." is clearly being violated by the state officials sworn to support it. Asking others to sign one's petition, at least to me, clearly comes under this clause. The state has institutionalized this activity to the point of silencing signature gathering organizations. For one you have to be a registered voter to sign them. Under this section all you have to be is an inhabitant, defined by my electric Webster's as "one that occupies a particular place regularly, routinely, or for a period of time." So this applies even to illegal immigrants. Troubling for those who are actively restraining the people from exercising this liberty.

21's requirement of all laws to first pass Constitutional qualification is bypassed by regularly by government at every level.

I know this point personally and painfully, having just spent six years with two cases making their way to the highest court of our state. It's shocking to discover how even our high court judges, who swear oaths to support the Constitutions to get their jobs, blatantly disregard both Constitutions and the Rule of Law, and do this with absolute impunity -- they can not be practically be held accountable (try suing one, or even just make a complaint to the cruel joke called the Commission on Judicial Fitness). A judge's signature can not only wipe out the Constitutions and everything the legislature passes, but your life as well. At our state's founding one of the framers said prophetically "If you get a corrupt judge you destroy the laws."

The bottom line remains the same -- it's the people, stupid!

" The procedure used is taught in Statistics 101 courses. If you have problem with it, you are a mathematical dunce."

So, we should throw out valid signatures just because we suspect they are bad. We go to one polling place where someone fails to check voter ID. Does that mean we should toss every vote in that polling place, or perhaps we should impute this across the entire state?

I actually agree with Mr Peralta, we should be very hesitant to deny anyone their voice in the democratic process. I am not against disqualification for cause, but disenfranchising based on statistical methods is the idiotic thing.

Evan has it correct. The Oregon initiative process allowed paid signature gathering from its inception in 1902 until 1935 when the Leg banned paid sig gathering. This ban was repealed in 1983 in Oregon, and following the US Supreme Court decision in 1988 paid sig gathering has been upheld as constitutionally protected form of political speech.

I spoke with the Secretary of State's office today because I, too, was confused about the seeming retroactive nature of this demand, as well as the possibility that Sizemore's measures would be kept off the ballot as he seems to be claiming they would. What I found out was that Sizemore and other chief petitioners were notified five months ago that they needed to maintain proper employment records beginning August 1, 2007 for purposes of verification of compliance with the new petitioner wage laws, which Sizemore has been supposedly following all along. If he's been following the law, then these records should not be difficult to produce.

Additionally, I was told that even if Sizemore does not comply with the request for employment records, so long as he submitted sufficient valid signatures by January 1, 2008 his measures will still be placed on the ballot. In other words, the master martyr's whining has no substance that I can see.

In my opinion, this is purely a matter of stubbornness on Sizemore's part. The only other conclusion one can draw is that he didn't actually follow the employment law or keep proper employment records as he claimed he did. Surely, that could not be the case.

Am I missing something?

Yes, Becky, you are missing something. There is nothing in the law (HB 2082) that says that we have to submit photocopies of all of our signature sheets "correlated" with our pay records. The law says we have to submit pay records, which we have no problem doing, and the law says separatedly that we have to submit photocopies of our petitions, which we can also do, even though it is pretty bureaucratic to make us subit photocopies to the same office that already has the orginals.

The problem we have is with the demand from the secretary of state that we connect the pay records to the petitions, something the law doesn't demand and something hard or impossible to do when you are not paying by the signature.

If we were paying by the signature, we could produce pay records for the petitions that were turned in to earn that pay. But we are paying by the hour. We don't require circulators to turn in all of the sheets when they get paid. They often keep partial sheets until they are filled out. Anyone familiar with the process knows how that works.

We have followed the law. Bradbury i not enforcing a law. He is making this stuff up. He is cheating. He has no evidence that we are paying by the signature. No one has even filed a complaint saying that we are. Bradbury has shut down the process as a way of obstructing measures his union masters don't want to see on the ballot.

Will we make the ballot anyway? Of course. We are 99 percent of the way there on five of my six petitions. But to those of you on this thread who honestly want to understand the problem: Bradbury is not only trying to apply a law retroactively or ex post facto. He is trying to enforce a law that isn't even a law and shutting down our petition drives because we don't obey a command he has no authority to issue. Heck, his demand isn't even in one of his administrative rules.

Bradbury is so dishonest and partisan that he really needs to get smacked down by a judge. Unfortunately only a federal judge or panel of federal judges has the guts to do that. And one or more of them is going to get that chance.

I have no problem agreeing that Bradbury is a partisan in need of a smack down or that he has it out for Sizemore. Very true. I also support Sizemore's efforts to make sure every valid signature counts. But doesn't the law authorize Bradbury to make implementing rules? I quote directly from the law:

"The Secretary of State shall review the accounts of each chief petitioner described in subsection (2) of this section in the manner and according to a regular schedule adopted by the secretary by rule." (emphasis mine)

So apparently the law explicitly allows Bradbury to make up the rules, no matter how much of a pain in the butt they are. It seems prudent to me that a political target like Sizemore would ask the Secretary for frequent updates on the specific rules so as to ensure compliance.

In any case, the law also states, "If a chief petitioner does not produce accounts ... There is a rebuttable presumption that a violation ... has occurred." Note the word "rebuttable." I would assume that if the Secretary is asking for something that is not in the rules and Sizemore is able to produce everything as asked for in the rules, then his failure to produce what the Secretary is requesting would create an easily rebuttable presumption of a violation. But that's just me.

I am glad about it. Any chance they get to stick it to Bill Sizemore and that crowd I say have at it. Bill if you remember welched on a business deal that information was in the Oregonian. Bill lost a lawsuit and has a huge sum against him. I think that was to the oea and to my knowledge has never paid that. I am not sure if he knows how to make an honest buck. Any time I see a petition that I can verify is by him or those around him I will not sign it, even if it is a good idea. No integrity.

Rob, the law explicitly states Bradbury can make up the rules. Operative word here is "rules." That's what Sizemore wants to ignore by focusing attention on the "law."

Becky,

Bill specializes in personal attacks when he has nothing else. I might add because he has nothing else.

On a radio story about this, some woman was complaining her name was not allowed as a petition signature on the petition to refer the domestic partnership bill.

REPORTER: " Did you sign the petition just like you sign your ballot?".

ANSWER: "No, I just printed my name. "

I seem to remember that signing a petition means a) Print name, b) Signature, c) address and whatever else.

If someone only printed a name and failed to sign, and the elections employee looking at the signature to match with the stored signature used for validating mail ballots couldn't match the signature on the computer with the printed name on the petition, it seems to me the responsibility lies with the person who only printed and neglected also to SIGN the petition.

It should not be the job of elections officers at any level to give someone who neglected to SIGN the petition the benefit of the doubt.

Rob, if there is no written rule anywhere, then Bradbury's actions would have to be viewed as highly questionable. But I have to say, knowing Bill and his penchant for refusing to do proper paperwork and then claiming he is being martyred for not doing it, I am skeptical. On the other hand, Brabury is what he is - an anti-initiative partisan. Something is still missing here, though.

Thank God that there are some Sizemores left in this state. There MUST ALWAYS be those who challenge the abuses and arboreal intellect of the political class.

Goooooooo BILL!!!!! Gooooooo Kevin!!!! <

Bill Sizemore wrote "Bradbury is so dishonest and partisan that he really needs to get smacked down by a judge."

Wow. Pot. Kettle. All that.

Sal,

You get it. That is the problem. People signed the petition in good faith and followed the rules. When their signatures were tossed they went into the county elections offices and legally proved that they had signed the petition, and yet Bradbury claimed the right to throw out their signature.

I find it (almost) shocking that self-professed liberals would defend such heavy handed government tactics.

Not that many on this blog will care, but we consulted with a nationally recognized hand writing expert when Bradbury did this to me in 2002. (He threw out 4,800 signatures for not matching, just enough to keep me off the ballot). The expert testified that many of the tossed signatures were so obviously the voter's signature that even an untrained novice should have known that it was genuine.

Whether the cause is liberal or conservative, we should all be alarmed when a government official disenfranchises voters so arbitrarily. You may find this hard to believe on Blueoregon, but Bradbury's office will not always be held by a liberal Democrat. Would you not want to be able to appeal to a judge if some conservative Republican SOS did this to one of your petitions?

This problem must be fixed. There is too much room for cheating. You may not mind when they do it to me, but come on, when is it right to cheat to keep voters from voting on an issue? Any issue? Why is it so important to some of you to keep the people from voting>

Pta Ryan said, "The guys that you're arguing with are the ones that see record snowfall and from that understand that global warming, or more accurately climate change is myth."

What a convenient mischaracterization. One that allows you to diminish those who acknolwedge thw widspread disputing of the IPCC claims.

As if relativley insignificant recent snow season is the only kind of contradiction there is.

The widespread snow records are merely a red flag flying in the face of the alarmists. The hard data measurements and science disputing the IPCC falsehoods are clear, convincing and readily available.

Republican vote suppresion dirty tricks?? Are there any cited by finding of fact fromm the FEC?

As far as I can tell, here are the applicable Administrative Rules. I don't see anything there about how the information is to be submitted. Maybe the online version is outdated? Are there any other rules that apply? Or is Bradbury really that far out of control that he is making stuff up just because he doesn't like Sizemore?

I read the section, Kari, and I do not see anything there that would indicate any sort of correllation of petition sheets with payroll records is required. I can understand why the Secretary of State's office would want them to be correlated and I think it should be made a part of the Administrative Rules. But it does not appear to me to be there at this time.

What I'm getting at is I think if Bradbury indeed stops Sizemore from circulating petitions based on his office's inability to decipher Sizemore's accounts, and nothing in writing backs up that action, that is dangerous and unacceptable. I've asked his office to show me where this authority is found - and believe me, I'd like it to be there. So far I have not received any response.

Bradbury ought to recognize the oversight this represents in his rules and take this as an opportunity to tighten up the rules so his staff can do the job the voters asked them to do. But he should not impose arbitrary requirements that appear to be designed to stop a particular political opponent. That only strengthens Sizemore's resolve and that of his supporters. It is precisely the sort of behavior that is fueling his comeback.

After reading all this and PreKarma, I hearby declare Becky (and maybe therefore Bill S.) the winners, and Bill B. (and maybe therefore Kari C.) the losers, until such time when Bill B. can actually provide the Admin Rules (or law) which clearly states that correlation of sheets and payroll records are required, and by which exact date.

When push comes to shove and judgement by a court, Bill S. will win and Bill B. will lose.

Please update us, Becky, when you get the smokin gun.

Becky, my Dad was an accountant, and I can't see him ever saying that people submitting accounts don't have to produce legible accounts. That is what you seem to be saying with the phrase "based on his office's inability to decipher Sizemore's accounts"--that what came to the Sec. of State office was not legible.

If someone turned in impeccably precise, neat, well formatted and printed accounts and the Sec. of State rejected them, that is one thing. But it seems to me that one trait many people would describe in Sizemore is sloppiness. He's shown that in debates where his answers were not clear, in sloppy language dissing anyone he disagreed with, and it wouldn't surprise me if he didn't also turn in sloppy accounts.

Kari quotes something above which includes the line "detailed accounts in accordance with ORS 260.262."

I went to a meeting in 2006 where the person presiding warned anyone running for office that the new C & E requirements called for such precision that classes were being given for treasurers and both candidates and treasurers were advised to take the classes.

I wonder if that isn't the case here. Did Sizemore just slap something together (my suspicion) or did he get them prepared by someone with the skill necessary to produce detailed accounts in accordance with ORS 260.262?

Next year there won't be Bradbury to kick around anymore, and if people are that angry about the behavior of the Sec. of State office, where is the serious Republican Sec. of State candidate? By that I mean someone of the caliber of Norma Paulus. She did a great job as Sec. of State.

As for the "Becky wins" comment, I suspect Kari was right to quote this:

(1) Each chief petitioner of an initiative or referendum petition who pays any person money or other valuable consideration to obtain signatures on the petition shall keep detailed accounts in accordance with ORS 260.262. The Elections Division will review these accounts in the manner and in accordance with the schedule set out in paragraphs (2) and (3) of this rule.

LT, I don't like the "Becky wins" comment, either, particularly since I'm not even sure what I think yet. In any case, you are correct about Sizemore's sloppiness and that is precisely why I was initially inclined to side with the SoS's office. The only problem with that is, unless I'm wrong, the paperwork is all being done by the petitioning company - Democracy Direct. From what I've heard, they're really trying to do things correctly. But to qualify that, I haven't ever seen any of their paperwork so I don't have any personal knowledge of the condition in which it arrived at the SoS's office.

I have done many a contribution and expenditure report and I understand the precision required is even greater now than it was back when I did them. I know Sizemore was not capable of maintaining adequate records to produce those reports, and he did not respect the record-keeping process, making it nearly impossible to produce accurate reports on his behalf. But if I have understood correctly, he is not processing money for petitioning at all anymore. I could be wrong, but it seems money is being given directly to the petitioning company. So the question is whether Tim Tricky respects the record-keeping process.

It would be highly disrespectful for Sizemore to dump disorganized accounts on the SoS's desk, particularly when he resists the notion of providing that office with sufficient funding to sort the mess out for him. If, however, he presented organized payroll accounts and the sticking point is simply that the petition sheets are not properly matched up to the accounts, then I think Bradbury needs to change the rules to specify more precisely how he wants the accounts submitted in the future and Sizemore ought to spend the money sorting the petitions out as best he can rather than on a lawsuit, and Bradbury ought to accept that.

All of this is purely hypothetical, of course, because I don't know the condition of the accounts. I'm simply inclined to believe at this point that we have a sloppy and stubborn activist on one side and a partisan who dislikes him on the other, and both are costing everyone else money and their rights. I really don't see why this can't be worked out reasonably as adults, but I suppose if it was it wouldn't be newsworthy and both sides prefer whatever publicity they can muster over actual responsibility. And I guess that makes me officially a cynic.

A couple more things. First, I'm not even sure that Sizemore has turned in his accounts yet in any condition. And second, I did hear yesterday evening from the SoS's office citing an OAR, but it does not specify any particular way that accounts need to be presented. Here is what I was told:

...in answer to your question ORS 260.262(2) says the following: For purposes of enforcing section 1b, Article IV of the Oregon Constitution, a chief petitioner of an initiative or referendum petition who pays any person money or other valuable consideration to obtain signatures on the petition shall keep detailed accounts. The accounts shall be current as of not later than the seventh calendar day after the date a payment is made to a person for obtaining signatures on the petition.

So while the law does directly say that the signature sheets must correlate to the payroll records it is certainly inferred. The administrative rule you referenced along with ORS 260.262 are what govern accounts and the submission of. Any direction we have given to Mr. Sizemore about signature sheets needing to correlate to payroll records comes directly from advice of legal counsel.

I personally don't feel the question is satisfactorily answered. In other words, on the surface, it seems Sizemore has a point. But knowing him as I do, I think Bradbury may also have a point. One could - and should - infer from the law that the purpose of submitting the accounts is to ensure the prohibition on payment by the signature is being followed and, therefore, that the accounts should be correlated with the petition sheets. Sizemore is claiming the opposite, though, saying that because he did not pay by the signature, he didn't collect signature sheets at the end of pay periods, but rather paid based on circulators' time sheets, allowing them to turn in signatures whenever they wanted to do so. Thus, he claims, he cannot match up the signature sheets with the payroll records.

If Democracy Direct, Sizemore's agent, makes out paychecks every two weeks or bi-monthly like most other legitimate employers, then that's probably the case. But if the company pays the petitioner at the time signatures are turned in, the way petitioning has always been done, then whether they called it an hourly wage or not, Sizemore may very well have a problem - and that may be why he won't turn in the paperwork. Bradbury may know this and may be calling his bluff. There is quite a lot here that we really do not know.

torridjoe: read the report and, again, cite the conviction(s) http://www.foxnews.com/projects/pdf/Vote_Fraud_Intimidation_Suppression_2004_Pres_Election_v2.pdf