On October 18, the Ohio Attorney General’s office filed a brief in support of Ohio’s ban on out-of-state circulators, in Citizens in Charge v Husted, 2:13cv-935, s.d. The state says that the ban is needed because it has a short time frame in which to check the validity of petitions, and if it needs to subpoena circulators, if the circulator is out-of-state, that process would take a long time.
This is illogical for several reasons. The most important is that Ohio doesn’t need to subpoena circulators, whether in-state or out-of-state, to check the validity of petition signatures. Furthermore, Ohio law already permits out-of-state circulators to work on independent presidential candidate petitions, and the state’s brief doesn’t explain how Ohio copes with checking that type of petition.
Also, the brief hints that out-of-state circulators who work on initiative petitions are interfering with the ability of Ohio residents to decide their own policies without outside interference. And the brief says there is a reasonable chance that the U.S. Supreme Court will hear Virginia’s pending appeal in the U.S. Supreme Court on a similar issue. Of course, even if the U.S. Supreme Court decided to hear that case, it would not be decided until mid-2014, and in the meantime, the Ohio plaintiff that is trying to circulate an initiative petition would not have the benefit of a decision for the next nine months, and would not be able to qualify its initiative for the 2014 ballot unless it used only in-state circulators.
“The state says that the ban is needed because it has a short time frame in which to check the validity of petitions, and if it needs to subpoena circulators, if the circulator is out-of-state, that process would take a long time.”
This is absurd for multiple reasons.
The election officials do not need the petition circulator to check whether or not a signature on a petition is valid. I have gathered thousands and thousands of petition signatures in many states over the last 13 1/4 years and I’ve never once been contacted by an election office, or even had an election office try to contact me, over the validity of the signatures which I collected.
Also, who is to say that just because a petition circulator is a regular resident of state that they will be easy to get a hold of. Maybe they will not answer their phone. Maybe they won’t have a phone. Maybe they won’t pay their phone bill and their phone will be disconnected. Maybe they will move to a different address within the state and not leave an address where mail can be forwarded. Maybe they will move out of a state or go on a long trip after a petition drive is over.
The “reasons” that they are coming up with do not hold up under intellectual scrutiny. They are nothing more than excuses for making ballot access more difficult.