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Colorado
Needs Truth in Petitioning Law
by
Judah Ken Freed
Paid
petition circulators now allowed to lie to
public when collecting signatures. There
oughta be a law.
.
Alleged
misrepresentation by those circulating the
English Language Initiative petition
brings a spotlight to a persistent and
pernicious loophole in Colorado election
law.
According to
Colorado Secretary of State spokesperson
Lisa Doran, according to Colorado election
law attorney Tim Daly at Isaacson
Rosenbaum Woods & Levy, according to
other sources consulted, there is nothing
in state law regulating what a petition
circulators may say to the public.
Petition circulators can lie legally.
"Verbal
misrepresentation by petitioners is not
specifically prohibited," said Daly.
Said Doran,
petitioners are only required to make sure
people have read and understood the
complete ballot title at the top of each
petition before they sign it. Colorado law
views each verified petition signature to
mean a free adult knew what he or she was
signing.
The problem is that
the current system for petition signature
collection in Colorado mitigates against a
trustworthy process.
Paid by the
signature with performance incentives,
petition circulators are inherently
encouraged to shave the truth a little or
a lot, telling people whatever they want
to hear to get them to sign.
Paid by the
signature with performance incentives,
petition circulators are inherently
encouraged to cajole or rush people into
signing before they understand exactly
what they are signing.
Because of this
system with a loophole for liars, the
public now tends to look on the petition
circulators at grocery store entrances as
the next of kin to telephone solicitors,
email spammers and other predatory
marketers devouring the
gullible.
The problem is that
the public has been burned too often by
misrepresentations and outright frauds in
ballot initiatives. Please recall the
Nineties backlash against Colorado after
the passage of Amendment 2 , which harmed
the state tourism and convention trades,
but decimated Colorado film and video
industry has still not recovered, as if
Hollywood never heard Amendment 2 was
repealed.
Another problem is
that voters are burned out by all of the
deceptive tax limitation amendments and
all the propositions eroding our human and
civil rights in the name of protecting
them.
Repeated press
exposures of trickery after the fact,
after the measures become law, have soured
voters on the grassroots initiative
process itself, contributing to a public
mindset of helpless apathy.
The problem is that
fraudulent petitioning practices are
souring voters on democracy itself. Fewer
and fewer people seem to vote in each new
election. Lack of faith in the system
destroys the system.
After exposures of
massive financial reporting fraud by major
corporations that are now bankrupting
investors and employees alike, Congress is
working hard to pass new laws that restore
integrity to corporate accounting and
auditing procedures.
In that same spirit
of restoring public confidence in our
public institutions, Colorado needs a
"truth in petitioning" amendment to the
state Constitution or the revised
statutes. Whether this moves comes though
an grassroots initiative of a referendum
from the legislature, voters need to be
given a change to say whether they want
truth in petitioning
A possible solution
could take several tracks.
First, somehow
change the financial compensation scheme
for petition circulators so they lose the
incentive to deceive people into hastily
signing before they understand an
initiative accurately.
An option is
increasing the payments per signature
coupled with stiffer penalties for
improprieties. Another option is paid or
volunteer "secret shoppers" who monitor
circulator compliance.
Additionally, please
consider the value of having petitioners
prove they understand an initiative
properly before they go out collecting
signatures to support it.
Perhaps petition
circulators could be required individually
or en mass to pass a simple test of 10 to
20 questions about the major provisions of
any ballot initiative they intend to
carry.
Do you think the
public would feel more confidence in a
ballot initiative system if the petition
circulators are certified knowledgeable in
the initiatives they carried? If they are
paid enough to keep them honest but
nonetheless closely monitored for
integrity, do you think the public would
be pleased?
Can Colorado afford
this investment in improving the quality
and integrity of our elections? Can we
afford not to make the
investment?
Rather than stress
an already strained state budget, why not
authorize funding through a one dollar
check-off on the state income tax. If
enough of us are not willing to donate a
buck to clean up the petitioning process,
perhaps we deserve what we get.
What matters is that
we do not sit complacent about the abuses
of public trust permitted under existing
Colorado petitioning laws, or the lack
thereof. What matters is that we do what
we can where we stand to strengthen pubic
faith in democracy.
Grassroots
initiatives are the closest thing we have
to genuine democracy in our representative
republic. The process needs to be
strengthened to encourage greater citizen
participation in society
Truth in petitioning
is doable. All we need now is the
political will to make it so.
Orginally
published in The Colorado
Statesman
July 2002
(c) 2002-03 by Judah Ken Freed
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