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Foul-play in Portland? Are these people serious?

It's official: the effort to repeal Portland's Voter-Owned Elections law failed to make it on the ballot. In addition to a high number of invalid signatures, the corporate-backed "First Things First" committee suffered from an incredibly high number of duplicate signatures.

And here's their response:

Committee leaders intend to file a complaint with the Secretary of State's Office today or next week. They want the state to investigate why there were so many duplicates and whether the people backing city-financed campaigns -- known among proponents as "clean money" -- may have played dirty by encouraging their supporters to sign multiple times. (From The Oregonian)

Huh?

Why would we ever do that? Why would we want to sign even once, let alone multiple times?

As of this writing, their website offers no explanation for how the repealers think this took place. Here's what I can speculate their baseless accusation might be trying to imply: VOE supporters signed multiple times, in the hope that the repealers would slack off and think they were done; then the county elections office (which is probably in on the conspiracy too) would discover all the multiple signatures and, just when "First Things First" thought they had qualified the repeal for the ballot, a-HA we've got them!

Are these people serious? Here's a more plausible scenario: VOE supporters spent their time encouraging people not to sign because we disagree with the repeal. Meanwhile, the signature collectors hit up the same few supporters again and again, because their position has no strong public support. And that's why we have a signature requirement for petitions to qualify on the ballot: so voters don't have to bother with crazy left-field ideas that lack significant public support -- like repealing VOE.


Tags: clean elections, public finance, Oregon, In the States (all tags)


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