On March 3, the Arizona House Government Committee passed HB 2587. The bill would outlaw paying initiative circulators on a per signature basis. The vote was 8-0. The bill doesn’t seem to outlaw paying circulators bonuses for high production, but it is vague. It says, “A circulator may not receive compensation for collecting signatures if that compensation is based on the number of signatures collected.”
If they don’t forbid the practice of paying circulators altogether then I don’t see what difference this makes. If taxpayers aren’t paying these circulators then it shouldn’t matter how they get paid.
Laws like this injure the ability of petition backers to know whether they can afford a successful petition drive. When it is legal to pay circulators per signature, backers can know how much it will cost. But when paying per signature is illegal, it is anybody’s guess as to how much it will cost. One hates to launch a petition drive without knowing if one has enough money to finish it.
They recently passed a similar measure in the VA House unanimously, but thanks to a democratic senator, the language got struck in committee.
It was instructive to try to find the motivation for the language which was sandwiched in between two reasonable provisions. The patron of the bill was not forthcoming in his motivation, so we suspect they will try it again next year. I suspect that none of the House members actually read the bill because it would have affected their own party efforts to collect sigs.