By Nuria Martinez-Keel, Oklahoma Voice
OKLAHOMA CITY — An Oklahoma bill to place new regulations on citizen-led policymaking has passed the state Senate.
Senate Bill 1027 would limit the number of initiative petition signatures that could come from high-population areas and would require anyone collecting signatures to be an Oklahoma registered voter.
The measure is headed to the state House after the full Senate approved it on Tuesday with a party-line vote of 36-8.
The bill would require that no more than 10% of signatures on an initiative petition could come from a county where 400,000 or more people reside. That would affect only residents of Tulsa and Oklahoma counties by capping the total share of signatures from those two counties at 20%.
Any county with under 400,000 residents could make up no more than 4% of the signatures on the petition. The bill’s author, Sen. David Bullard, R-Durant, estimated this would force signature gatherers to visit about 22 of Oklahoma’s 77 counties.
Bullard said current state law allows petitioners to focus solely on the state’s two major population centers while most counties are “completely ignored.”
Senate Democrats contended the bill adds barriers to the initiative petition process, limits citizens’ participation in government and undermines the constitutional principle of one person’s vote being equal to all others’.
“It would almost be funny if it wasn’t so tragic,” Sen. Regina Goodwin, D-Tulsa, said. “This is not about transparency. This is about suppressing a process.”
SB 1027 would block any out-of-state donations from supporting the circulation of an initiative petition in Oklahoma. It also would require the brief “gist” of a petition to include the potential fiscal impact of the policy and that it be worded with basic, neutral language.
Anyone gathering signatures would have to conspicuously display whether they are being paid and by whom, and they couldn’t be paid based on the number of signatures they collect.
