Bill would limit initiative petition signatures by county, giving less-populated counties disproportionately larger influence

OKLAHOMA CITY (KFOR) — A bill advancing through the Oklahoma Legislature would change how citizen-led initiatives make it onto the ballot by capping the number of petition signatures that can come from each county, a move critics say is designed to silence urban voters.

Senate Bill 1027 (SB 1027), authored by State Sen. David Bullard (R-Durant), would prevent more than 10% of required signatures from coming from Oklahoma or Tulsa counties.

Meanwhile, each of the state’s 75 other counties, most of which are rural, would be capped at 4% of total signatures.

To understand the bill’s impact, it helps to know how the initiative petition process works.

Say, for instance, you’re tired of new cars having obnoxiously bright LED headlights, and you want the state to outlaw them. You could petition the state to let voters decide if that should be a law.

Right now, your petition needs to get signed by at least 92,263 registered voters to make it on the ballot.

If it makes it on the ballot, more than 50% of voters would have to vote in favor of it come election time for it to become law.

In recent years, Oklahomans legalized medical marijuana and expanded Medicaid following this process.

Under current law, there are no restrictions on where petitioners can gather signatures to get an item on the ballot.

State Sen. David Bullard (R-Durant) sees a problem with that.

“Right now, in order to get those, they only have to go to two, maybe three counties,” Bullard said while debating SB 1027 on the floor of the Oklahoma Senate last week.

He claims people who gather signatures on petitions tend to skip over rural counties.

“We have 77 counties statewide,” Bullard said. “So the system we have now actually allows them to ignore other people, in other counties, and just stay in two counties.”

It is why he wrote SB 1027, which would cap how many signatures petitioners can get in each county.

Under SB 1027, petitioners would now only be allowed to get 10% of the 92,263 needed signatures from Oklahoma County and another 10% from Tulsa County.

For the other 75, largely rural, counties, they would each be capped at contributing no more than 4% of the needed signatures.

“We are actually moving out to more counties, getting the signatures of a more diverse population of Oklahomans,” Bullard said.

But Amber England, who has led numerous petition efforts over the past decade, takes major issue with Bullard’s assumption.

“It’s a lie that we don’t go to all 77 counties,” England said. “Every state question that I’ve been involved in over the last decade has gotten signatures from all 77 counties.”

She says that was especially true in her most recent effort, which successfully got a minimum wage increase question on ballots next year.

“We trained over 200 people, people from Broken Bow to Guymon, all the way up to Bartlesville, down to Altus,” England said. “All these folks fanned out across the state. Every person that picked up a clipboard and a pen and went out and collected signatures at rodeos, at festivals, at parades, all across the state in every single county of this state.”

News 4 crunched the numbers on Bullard’s bill, and found, even under his bill, as long as petitioners can get the maximum 10% of signatures in both Oklahoma and Tulsa counties, they’d only need to visit as few as 20 other counties to gather enough signatures to get the needed 92,263—still leaving out the state’s 55 least-populated counties.

“They’re actually taking the grassroots component out of the state question process,” England said. “They’re also disenfranchising rural voters by saying that only 4% of rural voters can sign a petition in any one given county.”

The bill passed the Senate last week along party lines.

But that wasn’t before some debate and concerns.

“How does this square with the constitutional principle of one person, one vote?” Sen. Michael Brooks (D-Oklahoma City) said while debating SB 1027 on the floor of the Oklahoma Senate last week.

Under SB 1027, not every signature would carry the same weight.

For instance, Oklahoma County makes up nearly 20% of the state’s population.

But if the people in the county could only contribute 10% of a petition’s signatures, as SB 1027 proposes, their voices would effectively be cut in half compared to their share of the state’s population.

But then, take Cimarron County, with fewer than 2,00 residents, it makes up 1/20^th of 1% of Oklahoma’s total population.

Under SB 1027, every person there could sign a petition, and Cimarron County would still be nowhere near hitting its cap of 4% of total signatures.  

News 4 crunched the numbers again and found it would basically mean Cimarron County’s influence on whether something makes it on the ballot would be 96 times greater than Oklahoma County’s, when considering each county’s share of the state’s total population.

“How does that not fly directly in the face of our constitutional right for the people to petition and have their voices heard?” said Sen. Regina Goodwin (D-Tulsa), while debating SB 1027 on the floor of the Oklahoma Senate last week.

Bullard, still sticking to his argument about reaching rural voters, defended the bill in response to Goodwin.

“Because we are not allowing them to ignore the voice and signatures of the 97.5% of the other counties in the state,” said Bullard.

But if you ask England, she thinks this was never about including more voices.

“Their motive is to take power away from voters. State questions have to pass by a majority of voters in Oklahoma, 50% plus one,” England said. “They just want to control all the process themselves. Special interest groups and powerful politicians, and lobbyists are just mad right now. They’re mad at Oklahoma voters because they can’t control the,m and they want to be able to control them. And so they’re rewriting the rules to take the freedom for Oklahomans to actually decide issues for themselves.”

News 4 reached out to the bill’s Senate sponsor, Bullard, and House sponsor, House Speaker Kyle Hilbert (R-Bristow).

Bullard never responded.

A spokesperson for Hilbert said he would be unable to meet with News 4.