On May 23, backer’s of Oregon’s initiative to establish a “top-two” system submitted 92,000 signatures. They need 82,579. The signatures will now be checked, and if the initiative needs additional signatures, the group has until July 3 to obtain more. Hence, it is extremely likely that the initiative will be on the November 2008 Oregon ballot.
Like similar initiatives in California and Washington in 2004, the Oregon initiative provides that all candidates would appear on the primary ballot, and all voters would get identical primary ballots. Then, only the two vote-getters with the most votes could be on the November ballot. The initiative does not apply to president.
The Oregon initiative provides that the candidate’s registration should be printed on the May ballot. If the candidate is endorsed by any particular ballot-qualified party, that information will also be on the May ballot. However, the only parties that can be mentioned on the ballot are those that meet the definition of “political party”, which is a group that polled 1% of the vote in the last election for a statewide office, or a group with registration of one-half of 1%, or a group that recently submitted a petition of 1.5% of the last gubernatorial vote. The Oregon initiative is therefore much more confining than the Washington state law, in which a candidate can choose any partisan label that is under 17 characters and is not obscene. Under the Oregon initiative, if a candidate is registered as a Socialist, “Socialist” will not be printed on the May ballot, since the Socialist Party is not a qualified party.