Nevada SB 212 would require statewide initiative petitions to obtain the signatures of 10% of the last vote cast in each one of Nevada’s 42 Assembly districts. If an initiative petition got enough signatures statewide, and got the required 10% in 41 Assembly districts, yet lacked enough signatures in just one Assembly district, then the entire petition would be invalid.
SB 212 passed the Senate Legislative Operations & Elections Committee on April 9, and is now in the Senate Finance Committee.
The EVIL ANTI-Democracy minority rule gerrymander MONSTERS strike back.
See the Star Wars movies.
Nevada readers- ATTACK the Nevada gerrymanders in the courts and the media.
UNEQUAL votes for each gerrymander winner.
UNEQUAL total votes in each gerrymander district.
About 25 percent indirect minority rule – half the votes in half the gerrymander districts.
The gerrymander minority rule MONSTERS in other States will try to copy the NV scheme.
Remedy – P.R.
Total Votes / Total Seats = EQUAL votes needed to elect each legislator.
How about make all of these legislators run around in boonie districts in Nevada trying to get 10% of the registered voters to sign a petition so they can stay in office? Make them do it when it is hot out.
If they had to do this themselves I’d bet they’d change their tunes real fast.
This is in response to past litigation. The Nevada Constitution requires 10% statewide, plus 10% in 75% (13 of 17) counties. In 2004, the 9th Circuit ruled this violated the Equal Protection clause because of the wide variation in county population size. The court suggested at that time that if legislative districts had been used, it might be constitutional (the court in part based its reasoning on past court cases regarding county-based rather, than population-based, legislative redistricting).
The Nevada legislature responded by requiring 10% statewide, plus a proportionate share from every county (ranging from 40,364 in Clark County to 29 in Esmeralda County). Last year, a federal district court ruled this new scheme also to violate the Equal Protection clause, in part because it was not as narrowly-tailored as a scheme based on legislative districts would have been.
It is not clear to me how the Nevada legislature can effectively replace part of the Nevada constitution by statute, simply because a federal court ruled that the Nevada constitution violated the US Constitution, especially when the new legislation presents additional obstacles on the initiative.
The real danger of this bill isn’t that you have to go to all the legislative districts to collect signatures. Most of the districts are where the people are: Las Vegas and Reno. The real problem here is that the voter has to know what district they live in and fill that in on the petition themselves. Due to all the districts being drawn in a small geographic area combined with the transient nature of Las Vegas it is unlikely that voters would know what district they are registered in. This is compounded when voters move from one district to another and are registered in their old district but not in the new.
This is mainly a ploy by the mining industry who is still sore from fighting regulatory initiatives in AK and MT.