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May 15, 2007

Let's Get This Story Straight

You all remember that game "Gossip," in which everyone sits in a circle, one person whispers something in the ear of the person next to him, who does the same on and on around the circle to the end, where the story is inevitably very different than it was when it began. Well, I was reminded of that game this morning when I heard Kari Chisolm on KPOJ talking about today's post on Blue Oregon about the initiative reform legislation making its way through the Oregon Legislature. He rightfully decried efforts by petitioners to mislead people as to the purpose of ballot measures so as to increase the number of signatures collected, but in the process repeated a story I have told that has apparently morphed over time into something other than what actually happened. So for the record, and to make sure nobody thinks I'm spreading lies, I thought I'd straighten the story out.

As Kari told it, and I'm certainly not faulting him for it, Bill Sizemore bragged around about how he would have his petitioners, who were seeking to overturn light rail funding, go to cafes and stores and other places to gather signatures and tell people that they were petitioning in favor of light rail. The general idea is fairly correct, but the particulars aren't.

When I was working for Bill Sizemore, he told me the story himself. Funding for light rail had been approved, but opponents (rightly, as it turned out) did not believe the public supported the project. To overturn the funding, Sizemore led a signature drive to refer the matter to the voters.

The way the referendum process works, the bill itself is circulated until enough signatures are gathered to put the matter to a vote. To the uninformed (people who don't know what a "referendum" is), it can look as if the petition is intended to ask voters to approve the bill, and they might easily assume that unless sufficient signatures are gathered, the bill, like an initiative, will die. So unless the person is sufficiently aware of the debate and knows a referendum is underway, or unless the petitioner explains it to them, they will not likely recognize that signing the petition will actually help provide a mechanism for doing the opposite of what the bill says by putting the matter before the voters for the purpose of overturning it. To make it more simple, in this case, funding for light rail already existed. By signing the petition, which looked like it was asking for funding for light rail, people were actually taking steps toward de-funding light rail. Back in March of 2006, Blue Oregon quoted me here about what Sizemore had told me:

He later gloated several times to me about how his petitioners collected a ton of signatures from people who were actually riding public transit at the time they signed the petition by telling them that the petitions were an effort to fund light rail - implying the petition was an initiative. People signing the petitions could not tell otherwise by looking at the form.

In other words, if the petitioners were being honest, they would have told signers that they were working to repeal funding for light rail. Instead, they specifically targeted people who supported light rail funding and lied to them to get them to sign the petition. (It would be the equivalent of petitioners collecting signatures to refer the two gay rights bills passed by the Legislature by asking people at a gay rights march to sign petitions to put gay rights measures on the ballot and not telling them they were collecting signatures to put a repeal before the voters.) I wrote about it again here, and Sizemore entered his own response in the comments, specifically denying foreknowledge and limiting the problem to one unnamed individual:

While I am at it, your memory of the light rail event is somewhat flawed. That drive was a referndum [sic] and was over before I knew that a single petitioner (not multiple as you state)was collecting signatures on the light rail line. His words were different than you quote and not false.

As I responded to Sizemore, I am willing to grant that he did not know at the time that this was being done. However, Sizemore was very clear to me when he relayed the story to me on multiple occasions that the petitioner (or petitioners) intentionally misled pro-transit signers into believing they were helping fund light rail when the opposite was true. It was the fact that they had misled pro-light rail people into helping overturn light rail funding that made the story funny to him and was the reason that he told it to me several times. The point is that Kari is correct that petitioners are not forthright at times in their efforts to collect signatures. And when it comes to referenda, so far as I can tell, it is still difficult to tell that the signature gathering effort is intended to repeal the bill be circulated.

Posted by Becky at May 15, 2007 11:28 AM