On March 3, the Iowa Libertarian Party filed this brief in Iowa Libertarian Party v Pate, s.d., 4:19cv-241. This is the case that challenges the 2019 law that moved the petition deadline for non-presidential independent candidates and the nominees of unqualified parties from August to March.
This lawsuit has nothing to do with the 2021 bill that increases the number of signatures for such candidates. That bill still isn’t law, because it Iowa’s Governor, Kim Reynolds, hasn’t taken action on the bill yet.
A March deadline for the November election is unreasonable.
Requiring petitioning during the winter months rather than the spring and summer would increase the spread of the flu and covid.
The risk of anyone getting sick from petitioning in cold weather is not a big concern. I have petitioned in cold weather many times and not gotten sick, including last year.
The bigger concerns with this are:
1} cold weather does make petition signature gathering more uncomfortable since you usually have to work outside, plus some people won’t sign if they are cold,
2) putting the deadline in March means less time to collect signatures, and a lot if campaigns are not even prepared to start for a deadline that early.
Petitioning during a pandemic is an example of superspreading activity. Petitioners are usually unhygienic and often fail to wear masks. All petitioning should be banned until the pandemic ends and even then they should receive mandatory vaccinations and be required to wear at least two masks.
ONE voter forms – via internet, media, junk mail, etc.
Send them in.
LOL @ the completely idiotic comnents from “Gavin Newsom is Handsome” above!
I agree with Gavin. Shut it down. The only thing that’s ridiculous is Andy’s covidiot denialism and superspreading. Even before the pandemic petitioning was unhygienic and gross and likely a big contribution to flu deaths. Now it’s at least ten times worse. There is no candidate or cause that justifies so many unnecessary deaths and illnesses, many severe and debilitating with long lasting and even permanent health impacts. We need a nationwide moratorium on all petitions for a year or two and a 9/11 style commission to consider whether, when and how it can be brought back safely in a much more controlled and regulated way. I also like demo reps idea about eliminating signature harvesting from the process. Let people sign their own petitions and mail them.
People are no more likely to get sick from petitioning than they are from shopping at a Walmart or getting gas at a gas station.
People at my market wear masks and practice social distancing. Anyone in violation is removed.
Asshole petitioners do not wear masks and get in the faces of passersby spitting and hollering bullshit. Sickening.
That’s ludicrous. Touching pens and clipboards that lots of other people handled? Talking to some loud person for minutes, especially if they don’t have their mask on and have been talking to other people all day? Not only would I get as far from you as possible, if I can I would get right back in my car and drive to a different grocery store, library etc just to avoid walking too close to you. And I wouldn’t even consider opening my door if you come to my house. In fact, I’m getting an electric razor wire fence at the far end of my driveway.
And a Doberman Rottweiler mix …just because of people like Andy. My favorite mask says STAY AWAY.
Gavin is 100% correct there!
Public health officials should use special guns to shoot the vaccine into petitioner superspreaders like they do with wildlife.
These troll posts are completely idiotic. Lots of people gathered millions of petition signatures across the country over the last year. I am not aware of even one of them who died, or even got sick from COVID.
Be careful Tom. Asshole petitoners have been known to kill, rape, and eat Doberman Rottweiler mixes.
Amdy the Neanderthal says nobody died?
Half a million seats missing from dining room tables say otherwise.
1) I am not aware of any petition circulator dying from COVID, or even getting sick from it.
2) It has already come out that people with co-morbidities, that is people who had other pre-existing health problems, as well as “suspected” COVID deaths, have been included in the statistics, so the REAL number of COVID deaths is actually a lot less than has been reported, so in reality, it is no worse than a typical flu season.
Andy is willfully ignorant. People who die from any cause usually have comorbidities. Covid is only listed when it’s the primary cause of death. Many covid deaths have actually been missed in the stats so actually 500k is an undercover. In addition to the deaths there’s actually a much, much larger number of people with long term health damage. It is nothing like flu. It’s at least ten times worse than a bad flu season and much worse than that when you count survivors who have all sort of long term symptoms and damage.
Undercount,not undercover.
The real number of covid deaths in the USA is probably closer to a million now, but it may go much higher as the new deadlier variants spread. They are doubling every week so we are probably headed for a new peak in April and May which will be much, much worse than all the previous peaks combined. We could well be looking at another million deaths or more in the next 2 or 3 months alone.
Personally I’m isolating at home and talking to people on zoom, Skype, etc. Thank goodness instacart and Amazon don’t deliver petitioners. I haven’t left the house or had any guests over for the past year. The risk is just not worth it.
Lots of the petition signatures on the California gubernatorial recall this year have been gathered by postal mail. The recall proponents postally send a blank petition to registered Republicans, and provide a self-addressed postage-paid envelope so the recipient can sign the petition, both as a voter and as a circulator.
Yes, lots of signatures on the Recall Newsom petition were gathered in the mail, but I can tell everyone for a fact that many Recall Newsom petition signatures were NOT gathered through the mail, and I am in fact one of the people who gathered signatures on the Recall Newsom petition, and I also know other people who gathered signatures on it.
Also, I know for a fact that zero, or close to zero, signatures on a Casino Gaming ballot initiative, and a Tobacco referendum, both of which happened la at year during the so called COVID “pandemic”, each turned in over 1 million signatures in California, and I worked on both of those as well.
I also know there were a few city and county initiatives that happened in California during this same time period which gathered signatures by asking people to sign in person.
Why would anyone want to recall the great Governor Gavin Newsom? He’s very handsome and one day he’ll be President.
When will CA communists P-U-R-G-E ALL Elephants who signed/circulated the Newsom recall petition —
as noted by RW ???
Stalin type death camps ??? —
or mere expulsion [flee OUT of CA to save life] like nazis escaping olde eastern Germany in 1944-1945 ???
—
Congress — NOOOO votes on 4 Mar 2021 — under siege more /// another attack ???
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2021/mar/3/capitol-police-say-they-have-identified-militia-th/
The California petitions only got enough signatures because the time to gather them was doubled.
The Recall Newsom petition got a 4 month extension, which is a bit less than double the circulating time. The same with the Casino initiative.
The Tobacco referendum only had 90 days to gather signatures (referendums in CA get less time to gather signatures than initiatives and recalls) and it did NOT get an extension, yet they still turn in over 1 million signatures, and still qualified for the ballot.
How many times do I have to say it? State election officials are just so dense. They could save themselves the hassle of processing nomination papers, and make money, too, if they just charge optional fees for ballot access.
But, of course, it’s not about making the process easier. It’s about making it as difficult as possible for outsider political action to happen.
They could set the fee high. As for recall newsom it had less than 750k signatures by the original non extended deadline.
The lockdowns and hysteria surrounding COVID did make petition signature gathering more difficult. The Casino petition especially got hit hard by the lockdowns due to when it came out.
Paying a fee to place an initiative, referendum, or recall on the ballot really would not work, because the point of gathering petition signatures for them is to show enough public support for bringing these things to a vote.
In practice, with paid signatures it just demonstrates that the initiative proponents have enough money to pay petitioners. They could just as easily pay the money directly to the state. The effect would be the same, but fewer people would get annoyed by petitioners and it would be better for public hygiene, especially but not only during pandemics and epidemics.
It does not show that the initiative proponents have enough money to pay petition signature gatherers because:
1) some initiative/referendum/recall petitions do get signatures from unpaid volunteers,
2) the petition circulators are not the ones signing the petitions, it is the members of the public who are legally qualified to vote who sign them,
3) not all petition drives who hire paid petitioners qualify for the ballot, as some fail to get enough signatures even with paid petition circulators.
Putting initiatives, referendums, and recalls on the ballot through a fee rather than by gathering petition signatures would also further empower the rich because it would eliminate grass roots unpaid volunteers from the process. It would also further remove the general public from the process since their signatures on petitions would not longer matter as to what issues make the ballot.
Also, how would one go about determining what the fee would be to place an issue on the ballot? I could see the fee easily being set so high that only the super-rich can do it, and there’d be no unpaid volunteer petition signature gathering to bring down the cost.
Initiatives that only use volunteers rarely if ever get on the ballot. They could still use their volunteers to help lobby the public to pass the initiatives rather than using them to get signatures to get on the ballot. Of course, members of the public sign, but if the proponents have enough money they will get enough signatures. The ones that paid petitioners and didn’t get enough signatures needed to raise their pay rates higher and they would have qualified. So again, the state only needs to set a fee and they would achieve exactly what the signature requirement achieves in practice.
The most logical way to set the fee would be to determine how much initiative proponents spend to put issues on the ballot and make it inflation adjusted.
Yes, initiatives, referendums, and recalls that ONLY use unpaid volunteers to collect petition signatures rarely qualify for the ballot, however, lots of these campaigns do get SOME signatures from unpaid volunteers, and however many they get from unpaid volunteers can help keep their costs down. Your proposal would eliminate this as a possibility.
That is a very difficult thing to quantify because conditions change all the time, thereby impacting the costs of obtaining ballot access.
The current Recall Newsom petition in California has been able to do a lot of volunteer signatures (although they have ended up paying people to collect signatures as well) in part because the petition is easy for people to download and print off the internet, because it is just one page, single sided. Some initiative and referendum petitions are multiple pages, with legal language printed on both sides of multiple pages, and few people are able to print these at home, and few are going to make the trek to a professional print shop to do it.
Furthermore, the entire point of the petition signature gathering process is to put the issue out to the public so they have a chance to read it, even if they only read the summary, and then THEY get to decide whether or not the issue should go on the ballot. Going to a fee only system as you suggest removes the voting public from the process of deciding which issues merit a public vote, and this goes against the reason for even having this process.
Some petitions to place issues on the ballot did pay out a lot of money and still failed to get enough signatures to qualify for the ballot. There was an initiative in California back in 2014 to split California up into 3 states, which was backed by billionaire Tim Draper, which failed to gather enough signatures to qualify for the ballot.
The Recall Newsom petition has also been able to get a lot of signatures by mailing the petition out to registered voters (and not that it costs money to obtain lists of registered voters). The fact that the Recall Newsom petition is just one page, single sided, means it is cheaper to print, and cheaper to mail to voters. The initiative and referendum petitions whose legal language is several pages long, with double sided print, costs more money to print, and more money to mail to people than the costs are for doing this with the Recall Newsom petition.
Should read, “note that it costs money to obtain lists of registered voters” above.
If they have only enough money to pay some but not all of their signature gatherers, or struggle to pay a filing fee, they aren’t going to have nearly enough money for the campaign to pass their initiative.
That is not true at all. I have seen campaigns that paid lots of money for ballot access petition drives fail to pass, and I have seen other campaigns that paid little money for ballot access petition drives pass.
The original question concerned candidates and parties, not initiatives, and both could have a system applied where the sponsoring individual or organization could choose to either collect signatures or pay a fee, a system which does already exist in some places.
Paying a fee might work with candidates (I know this exists in a few states for at least some offices), but it makes no sense at all for initiatives, referendums, and recalls.
FEES IN SOME STATES ESP WHERE FEW R FASCIST VOTERS IN RED DONKEY COMMUNIST GERRYMANDER AREAS
— IE 95 PLUS PCT DONKEY GHETTO AREAS.
SEE OLDE NOW GHETTO PARTS OF DETROIT, CHICAGO, CLEVELAND, ETC.