The Oklahoma legislature is not in session until next year. On September 25, an Oklahoma Democratic legislator said he will introduce a bill next year to make it a crime for anyone to pay a petition circulator on a “per signature” basis. The legislator, Rep. Mike Shelton, represents the 97th district in Oklahoma City.
He said, “We can’t continue to incentivize lying to the public about the issues. When a signature collector gets paid according to the number of signatures he collects, what’s to stop him from misrepresenting the issue to the public to get them to sign his petition? These matters are too important to allow snake-oil salesmen to bend the facts and flat-out lie just to fatten their paychecks.”
The implication of Shelton’s remarks is that the ordinary citizen is so stupid and gullible that he or she will sign any petition without looking at it first. Current Oklahoma law requires the title of the Initiative (which is written by the Attorney General) to appear in large print. Many legislators, judges and political commentators believe in their hearts that ordinary people are too uninformed and unthoughtful to be trusted at the voting box. This is the real reason why democratic practices in the U.S. are not secure…many of the most influential and powerful in the U.S., in their hearts, don’t believe in popular control of government. Therefore, they are eroding popular control of government, little by little, with laws and practices that reduce the political power of ordinary people.
