Yesterday the Arizona Secretary of State placed on the ballot a new initiative to raise state income tax on folks making more than $250K a year to pump $690 million into raises for teachers, who averaged $48K in 2017.
Now I’d love to spend time comparing that plan with my Sixer Surtax, which would have raised South Dakota’s teacher pay to Arizona’s average without a single drop of additional regressive sales tax. But I can’t get past the fact that Arizona is willing to put an initiative on the ballot less than three months before the election. Education advocates submitted a 74-box petition with 270,000 signatures on July 5, and in a process laid out in blissful detail in this official petition guide, the Arizona Secretary of State counted those signatures, distributed the complete signatures to county recorders to conduct 5% random samples, and okayed the sufficiently signed petition for this November’s ballot.
Compare that timeline to South Dakota’s absurdly early deadlines for ballot access. Arizona voters get to submit initiative petitions in an election year two months after their Legislature adjourns. South Dakota voters have to submit their initiatives a full year before the election, not to mention almost five months before the election-year Legislature adjourns. Thus, if the 2018 Legislature left any important issue unaddressed, South Dakota voters can’t place an initiative on the ballot to fix that failure until 2020.
And while South Dakota’s Secretary of State took five months to process all initiative petitions submitted last year for this year’s election, Arizona’s election officials were able to accept multiple petitions in July and process them by this week, even though Arizona petitions must have ten times as many signatures (150,642 for Arizona initiatives versus 13,871 in South Dakota).
South Dakotans deserve more opportunity to respond to and check their lazy and untrustworthy Legislature. For more responsive democracy and faster problem-solving, we should amend our statutes on petitions for initiated laws and Constitutional amendments to allow citizens to submit statewide petitions four months before the general election.
For most of South Dakota history the Legislature was required to pass a Joint Resolution to place an initiative on the ballot. That meant initiative sponsors submitted the petitions to the Secretary of State sometime during session. It would take one week to go through the petition. They would go name-by-name through the petition, not using the short-cut and somewhat suspect way they do it now. Because no one used paid circulators until the late-1990s, there were far fewer errors made on petitions. Grassroots circulators who care about an issue and the sanctity of the people’s right to initiate laws are not going to cut corners.
In 1984 two measures were put on the ballot this way dealing with highly sensitive nuclear issues, the Nuclear Freeze and the Nuclear Waste Vote. Some legislators were balking at voting for the Joint Resolution to place these measures on the ballot. Further, the 1985 special election on nuclear waste matters was placed on the ballot by the Legislature. After all this controversy, the Legislature decided they didn’t want to be placed in the middle of the initiative process, and passed a law in the late 1980s that would place initiatives on the ballot automatically when certified by the Secretary of State.
Part of the discussion then became what the deadline for submitting petitions should be if the Legislature didn’t have a role. I remember discussions about how grassroots citizens should respond to this. We were thinking about it in terms of how this change might affect the signature gathering. It was thought by everyone that such a timeline would serve both institutions. I can’t remember what the deadline was now, but I think we submitted petitions as late as May or June for the first Surface Mining Initiatives in 1988.
From that time through the early 2000s the deadline for petitioning initiatives was in mid to late spring.
I’ve been thinking about this and I believe there should be two deadlines for two different processes. One would apply only to grassroots initiative efforts by South Dakota citizens that used only volunteer circulators. The other would apply to initiative efforts by interests who used paid circulators. The efforts by the professional operations would require the early deadline and the added bureaucracy. The one used strictly by volunteer South Dakota grassroots citizens ought to have far less bureaucracy involved and a shorter deadline.
I think this would be constitutional.
I meant the grassroots effort should have a “longer” deadline, something like May 15.
I think Don’s idea has merit.
What I’d like to see most is a state government that tries to ENHANCE citizens ability to participate and respect that. The SDGOP is a poor example of public servants but they’re an exceptional example of Koch servants.
More money coming to school districts…to arm teachers with government guns. Soon, swat teams will be on call to take rogue teachers down. What could possibly go wrong with such a scheme?
“WASHINGTON — The Education Department is considering whether to allow states to use federal funding to purchase guns for educators, according to multiple people with knowledge of the plan.
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A firearms course offered to school teachers and administrators in Colorado.CreditJason Connolly/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Such a move appears to be unprecedented, reversing a longstanding position taken by the federal government that it should not pay to outfit schools with weapons. And it would also undermine efforts by Congress to restrict the use of federal funding on guns. As recently as March, Congress passed a school safety bill that allocated $50 million a year to local school districts, but expressly prohibited the use of the money for firearms.” New York Times 08/22/2018
New Amway ideas from Betsy Devos, just encouraging little Johnny to read by playing Russian Roulette with him.
Jerry, I’ll support an initiative to block using federal funds for any such violent purpose.
Donald, I’m intrigued by the possibility of treating paid petition drives differently from all-volunteer petition drives. Your point about much greater error rates for paid drives than volunteer drives seems key to justifying the earlier deadline for paid drives: it would be useful to go back through the books and get the hard numbers on error rates. The lowest error rate in 2015, 13.61%, was IM 21, the 36% rate cap, which was, I think, all volunteer. But medical marijuana was also largely volunteer in 2015 and posted the second-highest error rate, 45.48%. Worst was IM 23, the union fair share plan, at 51.77% error.