Initiative reform law must be repealed

In 2013, House Bill 2305 famously changed the signature requirements of candidate campaigns such that new political parties like the Libertarians and Greens would find it difficult, and in some cases numerically impossible, to place their candidates on the ballots.

This was passed by a Republican Legislature to guard its legislative majority. But when a coalition came together to refer that measure to the ballot, the lawmakers backpedaled and repealed their own bill. And once the election had passed, they adopted a new bill that was even worse than the original.

Incredibly, the 2016 Legislature — still under the thumb of a GOP majority — decided that guarding the ballot from challenges for office was not enough. Last month, Gov. Doug Ducey signed HB 2404, which sets the financial bar for bringing initiatives and referendums to the ballot even higher. This measure effectively silences ordinary people by ensuring that only the most financially privileged people of Arizona may ever place their own legislation before the people.

This injustice will not stand. Grassroots Citizens Concerned has put the Arizona Legislature on notice that their pattern of placing their own political interests above those of the people of Arizona is unacceptable.

Here are a few reasons why we believe the people of Arizona will agree with us when this question is placed before them in November 2018:

We already have a two-tiered system where grassroots individuals must stand outside in 100-plus degree weather to gather signatures for initiatives and referendums, while monied interests can pay by the signature.

HB 2404 creates a much more elite tier of people who can afford the compliance costs for wage labor, and knocks out the tier which had been accessible to the grassroots level. This inequality is completely incompatible with the concept of a bottom-up society of equals.”

By intervening in the paid-petitioner marketplace, HB 2404 takes away a lucrative means by which lowincome people can make a decent daily sum, and forces them into the minimum-wage model where they must work more hours for less pay for the sake of advancing the interests of wealthy campaign financiers.

If HB 2404 were really about protecting the ballot from signature fraud, it would have included candidate petitions — with which they also would have to comply — in its scope.

Instead, we find that it applies only to initiatives and referendums — a populist innovation not available in many states but which the framers of the Arizona Constitution intended to be a mechanism for the people to have an equal check and balance on our representative bodies.

This choice to target acts of the people while excluding their own campaigns from the same requirements perpetuates a top-down inequality that is contradictory to the spirit of a representative democracy.

It is for this reason Grassroots Citizens Concerned will be circulating a referendum to repeal HB 2404 in its entirety to return the power to the people where it belongs.

Mike Shipley, a longtime activist in the Liberty Movement, is the chairman of Outright Libertarians, and founder and chairman of Grassroots Citizens Concerned. Email him at mike .shipley@outlook.com.

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