Big money may not be enough in Portland, Oregon
By Dave Algoso
Posted on Tue Feb 14, 2006 at 09:06:39 AM EST
Last year, Portland's city council passed the first municipal
Voter-Owned Elections law. The city's big corporate players responded by
spending almost $350K collecting petition signatures in an attempt to place a repeal before voters on the May 06 ballot. The supporters of the repeal effort make up a who's who of Portland corporate interests: Portland Business Alliance, Qwest, Portland General Electric, Comcast, etc.
And it now looks like they've failed!
Last month, they turned in 40,988 signatures. To qualify for the ballot, they only needed 26,691. (As anyone who's collected signatures knows, you always expect that a certain number won't count, usually because the signer isn't registered to vote or just has bad handwriting.)
Despite spending $13 per valid signature needed, it looks like they've failed to get on. We won't know for certain until later in the week, but several news sources are reporting that the petitioners had too many invalid signatures and too many duplicate signatures, such that they effectively have fewer than the 26,691 they need.
It would seem that the Oregonian was blowing hot air last summer when it asserted that "finding voters who oppose the council's new system...should be easy." The opponents of Voter-Owned Elections found it to be quite difficult, expensive, and perhaps ultimately fruitless. Could it be because Portlanders agree that elections should be voter-owned?
Tags: Oregon, In the States, public finance, Qwest, Comcast (all tags)
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