Let the people rule

Ballot-initiative petitions to be signed in Arkansas include ones on the Freedom of Information Act, the Educational Rights Amendment, and on lifting the near-total abortion ban. Image by Ben Goff found on Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

This past weekend was pretty busy for me, with finishing up one house/cat-sitting gig and getting ready for another, going to a ceramics sale for a friend who’s moving to another state, and signing the last two of the ballot initiative petitions I hadn’t had a chance to sign yet. (The very first petitions I signed were for the Freedom of Information Act measures, and I was the first to sign at the Arkansas Press Association event months back; if you have yet to sign and you’re a registered voter in Arkansas, please do. You might remember that the governor attempted in a special session to hobble our FOIA, one of the strongest in the nation, after the infamous lectern purchase as well as questionable travel records were uncovered by a lawyer/blogger. By enshrining the FOIA into the state Constitution, it will be given greater protection against political gamesmanship.)

Signing the petitions doesn’t necessarily mean I’ll vote for the measures if they make it to the ballot (though FOIA, of course, considering my profession), but I think it’s only fair that they have a fighting chance to get there in the first place. Considering all the barriers to ballot access that have been erected in the past few years (some after failing in legislative referrals before voters in statewide votes twice before), I believe anyone who cares enough about the motto of this state ought to actually try to let “the people rule.”

If you want to sign a petition, or gather signatures for one, you should be allowed to do so, instead of being threatened. Give ballot initiative petitions a fair chance, then let the voter have their say if they make it to the ballot. Image found on The 19th News.

Or we could let those who don’t want us to have a say in our government (unless we agree with them) win. Funny how so many of the people who claim to believe in small government want to increase government’s oversight over issues they don’t like, and build ever-higher barriers to people who want to have a say in what the government does. Hmmmm.

I have friends who are collecting signatures for various proposed initiatives, but as volunteers, so their names aren’t on the lists of paid canvassers recently released by the Family Council as part of the Decline to Sign campaign against the abortion and marijuana amendments.

It’s all well and good to campaign against an initiative, but publishing the names and towns of canvassers crosses a moral line. Decades ago it wouldn’t be as big of a deal as there would be actual legwork involved in getting addresses and other information for those canvassers when all you have is the name and town, but now … all you need is an Internet connection and you can find just about anything.

There’s a lot of information you can find for free, but there are also many sites that will charge you for more in-depth data, with the expectation you won’t use it for anything illegal (ha!). Illustration by John Deering.

Over the years since I became Voices editor, I’ve heard from more than a few letter-writers who, having written a letter to the editor, later received hate mail at their addresses, or received harassing anonymous phone calls. But their addresses and phone numbers are never printed with their letters. The trolls aren’t only online, unfortunately, but they use online resources to expand their reach. Oh, joy.

That’s one of the reasons I’m so proud of our letter-writers who are willing to stand up for what they believe, using their own name instead of cowering behind an anonymous persona (remember, we don’t print anonymous or pseudonymous letters on the Voices page).

I’m sure right now on our newspaper website, the resident trolls (you don’t have to use a real name there) are again trotting out the story of how I allowed and encouraged doxxing of one of the trolls, which didn’t happen, as a way of “proving” my rank hypocrisy in calling attention to the Family Council effort. (I don’t moderate the newspaper website, despite their claims, and never saw the supposed doxxing, which apparently was only a name and town; actual doxxing is generally more personal details than that, including things like workplace, finances, etc.).

Indivisible Little Rock’s chapter was one of several groups gathering petition signatures at a recent event at Little Rock’s Whitewater Tavern. Image by Paige Eichkorn found on Arkansas Advocate.

As others, including some of those paid canvassers, have pointed out, the reasoning of letting people know where paid canvassers are collecting signatures is questionable at best, especially since signing events are well-advertised already and the canvassers are not necessarily getting signatures in their hometowns, and at minimum it gives off the appearance of an intimidation effort.

Rebecca Bobrow, director of strategy for Arkansans for Limited Government, said in a story by the Democrat-Gazette’s Neal Earley after the abortion amendment names were released, “The canvassers working tirelessly to collect petitions in support of the Arkansas Abortion Amendment are proud of the work they are doing to promote reproductive liberty in the state and to engage in direct democracy—they aren’t hiding. But when the Family Council releases lists of their names and whereabouts to their network of anti-choice protesters who vehemently, and sometimes violently, disagree with our work, it puts our team at great risk for harassment, stalking and other dangers.”

Jerry Cox of the Family Council said, “If we had intended to intimidate anyone we would have included that [home address] information, but we deliberately decided not to put that on there.”

Put the finger away, Jerry. Publishing those names and towns is clearly intimidation. Image by Staci Vandergriff found on Arkansas Democrat-Gazette.

But like I said, a name and a town are all that are needed nowadays. Heck, I’ve had two recent technology-aided incursions myself in the past few months, one of which would have cleaned out my checking account had I not been vigilant (the first one meant I had to get a new Walmart card and change passwords, and the second I had to decline the payment request on PayPal, report the transaction, block the person who requested it, and change passwords/add a passkey).

I don’t care what side of an issue you may come down on, but surely we can all agree that political tactics like this go too far and endanger all of us, not just the people who have been exposed as being paid to collect signatures. It’s not just that they’re opened up to harassment and worse, but that those who allow this to happen are sacrificing basic human morals for political one-upmanship.

This is how I see most political “battles” these days, but the ones over some of the ballot initiatives recently are far more serious, bringing our morals into play. GIF found on Pinterest.

(There was a separate to-do recently involving the FOIA effort, with one of the backers of the initiatives handcuffed and ejected from the convention center where the Bar Association conference, which she was attending as an attorney, was taking place. In that instance, the convention center, a public building, comes off looking very bad.)

And this is even without mentioning that our own state government is part of the force mobilizing against these petitions, with the governor having dispatched two groups of friends/employees to work against the abortion and marijuana amendments as well as the Arkansas Educational Rights Amendment (a previous effort to repeal the LEARNS Act fell short, thanks largely to delays by the attorney general’s office that cut short the amount of time to collect needed signatures; this current effort would, among other things, ensure that private and homeschools that receive state money would have to follow the same rules as public schools). There are also big-name donors contributing to the campaigns against the ballot initiatives (before they ever make it to the ballot), such as members of the Walton family to the education amendment opponents; for whatever else good the Waltons may have done for Arkansas, this won’t be forgotten by those fighting for public schools to have a chance to succeed. And then there’s all the misinformation being spread about the various initiatives (including that the abortion amendment would allow abortion under any circumstance till birth).

Ugh.

That’s one of the reasons I take a social media break every week. Editorial cartoon by Jeffrey Koterba, Omaha World-Herald.

The world is not a place of binary choices, but of shades of gray. As I’ve said many times before, I’m no fan of politics as practiced today, and my beliefs are all over the map, just as I believe most people’s are. I see no harm in letting people have their say at the ballot box. Not every ballot initiative has been successful, so why not let fairness rule and let those that have jumped through all the prior legal hoops have an honest chance to at least make it to the ballot so the people can say yea or nay?

Are we that afraid of how the people might vote that we need to lie, needlessly hamstring them with additional requirements to make it even harder for citizen-led initiatives to make it to the ballot (like raising minimum signature thresholds to “not less than one-half of the designated percentage of the electors” in 50 counties rather than 15 counties), and on top of that, make them fear for their lives?

That’s just wrong, no matter how you slice it.

Ollie and Charlie agree that the campaigns to keep people from signing petitions to place measures on the November ballot are crazy, and that people just need to calm down. Unless someone has encroached on your napping territory. Then they may be smacked.