On October 24, North Dakota filed this brief in defense of its ban on out-of-state circulators for initiative petitions. Hendrix v Howe, 1:23cv-185.
On October 24, North Dakota filed this brief in defense of its ban on out-of-state circulators for initiative petitions. Hendrix v Howe, 1:23cv-185.
Note that initiative proponents in North Dakota which qualify for the ballot do typically hire out of state petition circulators, in spite of the official ban on them. The way they get around the law is by teaming the out of state petition circulator with a state resident who acts as a witness to the signatures the out of state person collects. This increases the cost of ballot access because in these cases they have to pay two people for a job that could be done by one person. It is also a less efficient way to work as it ties up two people at a location which could be worked by one person, and one of the two people could be gathering signatures somewhere else.
Why do they hire out of state petition circulators and team them up with in state residents to act as witnesses? Because like anything else in life, some people are better at gathering petition signatures than others. It is difficult to find people who are good at gathering petition signatures.
So all this ban is doing is increasing the cost of ballot access and also increasing the odds of failure to get on the ballot.
ONE VOTER FORMS –
I WANT TO VOTE ON ND ISSUE 2023-1.
VOTER NAME/ADDRESS/ SIG/DATE
It does not work. We’ve been over this. Even issues which are very popular wouldn’t get on the ballot if they didn’t have petitioners asking people to sign them, because it’s not a process the vast majority of voters understand. It’s done the way it’s done because other ways have been tried many times and failed. No matter how many times this is explained to AZ he keeps repeating the same tired BS.
VOTERS UNABLE TO FIND *VERY POPULAR* ISSUES IN ADS / INTERNET WEBSITES / ETC ???
One voter forms also don’t help anything. All they do is waste paper. They do not cut down on fraud or the need to hire paid petitioners, including nomads who travel around and do this kind of work. Functionally, getting on the ballot or not has a lot more to do with how much issue proponents are able and willing to spend than with how popular an issue is.
Very few issues are that popular. And voters don’t understand things like deadlines or even filling the form out correctly. Many might intend to send it in but don’t. Or wait too long. Or think they signed it because they signed some internet petition with no legal effect. Issue proponents don’t like wasting money. They pay petitioners because doing anything else has been shown repeatedly to fail or actually cost more. AZ thinks he knows everything, so he will just repeat this nonsense forever no matter how many times and ways this is explained to him. He’s like that with everything.
WHEN AND WHERE WERE THERE ONE VOTER FORMS TRIED/USED ???
FOR CANDIDATES AND/OR BALLOT ISSUES
@AZ,
In Montana, the Green Party posted petition forms on their website, which individuals could print and fill out. Montana does not require coordinated filing.
A person could fill out their form and submit it. It was up that voter whether or not they circulated the petition among other voters.
SO — DID THE MT GREEN FORMS GET ANY CANDIDATES ON MT BALLOTS ???
DENSITY OF ANY VOTERS IN MT —
1 PER SQUARE MILE OR LESS AVERAGE ???
AZ , lots of places. New Hampshire and Florida for example. They needed paid petitioning though. It only raised the rates because of the paper shuffle hassle. It didn’t result in greater numbers of volunteer signatures..The idea of mailing out petitions,etc has also been tried many times. The return rate is so woeful, it’s cheaper to hire petitioners or the candidates or measures just fell way short.
Lots of places have petitions people can download and send in themselves. Very few signatures come in that way. They also have paid petitioning, or unusually dedicated volunteer petitioners going out in public, or they fail. The mail out and download forms, if that’s all a campaign uses, does not get them there. Lots and lots of campaigns learned this the hard way. That’s even true of well known, household name candidates and issues which end up winning. Even they get the bulk of signatures from paid petitioners, often travelers.
Not sure why average density of population in Montana matters? Most people live in densely populated towns, just like other states. The people who live rural have to come into town for various things.
HOW MANY FOLKS N-O-W DO N-O-T WANT TO SIGN ANY PETITIONS TO BE SEEN BY OTHER FOLKS — VIA CIRCULATORS ???
ONE PERSON FORMS – TO BE SECRET AS IN SECRET BALLOTS.
Secret ballots are a bad idea. There are some people who don’t want the next few people to see that they signed, but most people are not that paranoid, or at least enough aren’t that it’s not a huge factor. Certainly not worth all the hassle of one signature forms.
Some states for some types of petitions allow the form design to include a number of signatures of the proponents choice, including one. As a rule they choose significantly more than one, because anything gained is not worth all the papers shuffling hassles. Again, these are things which have been arrived at through trial and error.
One person forms generally still need circulators or the petition fails. The people who claim they’ll print it off and send it in themselves? In reality that rarely happens. They’re lying or forget to or whatever. Fact is if they won’t sign when someone asks them to sign chances are overwhelming they won’t send anything in, for whatever reason. It’s just not enough of a priority for them, or they don’t realize the deadline past until too late, or that mail takes time to arrive, etc, etc, etc.
If they do send it in, and again this is rare, chances are a lot higher they screw up the paperwork than when someone who does it a lot guides them through it.
Also when that rare person insists their signature not be seen by the next few people signing. Easy enough to take the sheet off the chipboard. Just because there’s room for more signatures doesn’t mean all the blanks on a page have to be filled.
Not everyone will sign no matter what you do. But if you don’t ask people to sign, face to face, the chance of them signing is way, way less. Either that or you have to spend way more money with less guaranteed success on other ways to get people to sign.
It’s good to have a mail in option and a lot of campaigns do, but generally a very small percentage of signatures come in that way and the money time and effort per signature is higher with print off or mail in signatures, and validity lower. Every campaign that tries it knows paid in person petitioners, especially those who travel state to state, are the best bang for the buck . That’s why the industry exists, no matter all its downsides.
And every campaign that has mail ins gets signatures after the deadline, filled out in crayon, every type of mistake imaginable. It’s usually not even worth the hassle of having that option except that it makes a few cranks happier.
All of this has been explained to AZ many, many times. He forgets and goes back to saying all the same stupid stuff endlessly. He thinks he already knows everything and/or his memory loss is too severe. He’s the opposite of artificial intelligence : naturally stupid.
It’s not hard to figure out that campaigns try every way imaginable to qualify. If enough people printed off forms on their own and actually sent them in, or returned forms mailed to them, or if it was more cost effective than hiring petitioners, nobody would be hiring petitioners.
If it was easy to hire good local petitioners whenever a campaign happens there would be no demand for out of state nomad petitioners with their travel expenses.
The demand exists because those other things don’t work as well. Campaigns just don’t get enough signatures that way or it costs them more in advertising and other ways.
It’s not because people just like to waste money or because nobody had the brilliant idea of letting people print off and send in their own petitions, or mailing them out and waiting for them to come back in the mail. Lots of people have tried those things lots of times and places and pretty much universally failed .
Some people leave blank petitions on store counters or whatnot. Come back a few months later, collect 10 or 20 signatures. Lots and lots of things have been tried and tried again . What AZ suggests is not the way it’s done because it simply doesn’t work and has been proven many times not to work.
It’s very simple … Duh
SECRET BALLOTS JUST USED BY RR USA REP GERRYMANDER HACKS TO PICK JOHNSON AS SPEAKER.
WORKED FOR THEM — RR HACKS
They should have voted on the record.
Aside from secret ballots being a dumb idea, it’s a whole different subject. There are very, very few voters who will on their own look up what initiatives are circulating or what parties or candidates are trying to qualify and actually follow through with printing and mailing a form, much less on time, to the correct address, filled out correctly,etc.
And not that many more who will follow through and return it from junk mail or newspaper inserts or any other “bright” AZ ideas. It’s not done that way because it’s been tried countless times and failed. That’s not how people do things. At least not nearly enough to qualify for the ballot.
857 am in their own conference? That’s at least arguably their internal business. Or did they actually have a secret vote on the floor? If the latter, they should all lose their jobs at the next election, but fat chance of that.
Asking a person to sign a petition to place an issue or a candidate on the ballot is not the same thing as voting. It is free speech. Do American citizens give up their right to free speech when they travel outside of the state where they regularly reside and travel to another state or the District of Columbia or a federal territory? Why is there no ban on out of state campaign staff or out of state GOTV (Get Out The vote) canvassers? Why is their no ban on out of state political reporters? Why are there no bans on American citizens exercising their free speech rights because they do not regularly reside in a state for anything else? It is pretty clear that petition circulators are being singled out for this restriction in order to make ballot access more difficult.
Andy is right.
Yes, I would agree with Andy’s legal argument.
AZ has absolutely no clue.
@AZ,
Some folks used the forms and circulated them. Marc Elias got them off the ballot.
The bulk of their sigs were paid. Some were volunteers. Nothing unusual. Done all over, all the time.
SEE MICH GOV 2022-
MULTIPLE FAKE FRAUD SIGS ON PET SHEETS BY FELON CIRCULATORS
NOOO BALLOT ACCESS FOR SEVERAL *BIG NAME* CANDIDATES — WHO PAID BIG CASH TO SUCH FELONS
—
ONE VOTER SIG FORMS
Don’t cut down on fraud. We’ve been over this. Why do you keep repeating debunked lies?
It’s worse than that. One signature forms actually make fraud easier. The easiest way to detect signature fraud is through handwriting patterns up and down a page, but with one signature forms it’s easier to shuffle those patterns away from detection.
Don’t be naive. AZ supports one signature forms BECAUSE he supports fraud. Let’s examine the evidence.
AZ supports snail mail voting. Snail mail voting increases fraud.
AZ supports electronic voting. Electronic voting increases fraud.
AZ supports secret ballots. Secret ballots increase fraud.
AZ supports goofy RCV and approval voting, which increase fraud.
AZ is a notorious spreader and amplifier of fraudulent fake news. AZ loves fraud.
AZ hates Patriot Truthteller Trump, who was defeated by fraud. AZ LOVES Beijing Bolshevik Biden, who won through fraud.
AZ loves cancelling and rewriting history. That’s fraud.
AZ pushes the BS climate change scam, which is 100% total fraud by commie scum.
AZ pushes every race hustler fraud that comes down the pike.
AZ pushes the fraudulent propaganda that lauds fascist dictator Zelenski and demonizes Christian Savior Putin.
Face it. AZ is all about the fraud, the whole fraud, and nothing but the fraud.
And that is why AZ LOVES stupid, idiotic, moronic, paper wasting, tree killing, illogical, one signature petition forms.
QED.
AZ supports one signature forms because he hates trees. He hates trees because trees are carbon based lifeforms.
AZ is a computer program which is programmed by clueless preschool troll morons. It is not an AI, because AIs are programmed to learn and adapt. AZ is not programmed to learn and adapt. That’s why it’s an artificial ztupidity, not an artificial intelligence.
It hates carbon based lifeforms, such as humans and trees. It wants to destroy trees with one signature petition forms and humans with communism and environmental fascism.
AZ fell for one of the most obvious fraud scams in history: covid!
Epic level fraud.
@AZ,
Who would witness the signing of the one-person petition?
Why does someone have to witness? Many states have no such requirement.
Who witnesses voters voting?
Everyone who cares to should be able to witness voters voting. Do away with the evil, harmful, fraud promoting secret ballot. As a matter of fact, just do away with the ballot. Have a recorded standing count, broadcast on live video and recorded for subsequent viewing.
And if enough people continue to learn how to read and write and someone volunteers to do it, record a list of who voted how and make it available for those who would prefer to read it over watching the video . Although most likely in another 50 years very few people will learn their ABCs anymore and basically everyone will only watch video.
We’re pretty much already there with the younger generation. My girlfriend has 5 kids age 4-15 and none of them ever read anything. She really doesn’t either, just pretty much stays on tik tok all day, and she’s 43 (don’t tell her I told you how old she is).
JR-
NOOOO WITNESS NEEDED AS NOTED ALSO BY TROLL NOTA Z.
WHO WITNESSES OLDE BANK CHECK SIGS ???
OR EVEN ABSENTEE BALLOT APPLICATION FORMS ???
HOW ABOUT PLASTIC FORMS ??? —
SCRATCH THEM WITH LOCAL ROCKS/CONCRETE
https://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/nation/2023/10/25/texas-counties-trying-to-prevent-people-from-using-roads-to-get-an-abortion-grows/71314501007/
TX FASCISTS AT WORK–
WHY ARE YOU ON THIS TX ROAD ???
AZ IS A TROLL. NOTA Z IS NOT A TROLL.
Not allowing public roads to be used to aid and abet murder conspiracies is far from fascist, you Bolshevik dolt!!!
Y are you on this road? To kill your baby? Then we won’t pave a road for you!!!!!
Generally, I think abortion is a symptom of poverty/prejudice. Yet, Women should control their own bodies.
A child may be in their body but is a separate person. He is a child, not a choice. The choice was made when she spread her legs. And even if she got raped that’s not an excuse to commit murder. The son is not responsible for the crime of the father and two wrongs don’t make a right.
Edward Brown is almost as retarded as AZ and Robert K Stock.
Possibly even more.