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Utahns for Ethical Government is Moving Ahead With Its Signature Drive
June 2, 2010In response to the Lieutenant Governor’s release yesterday of Senate District counts for the UEG ethics reform initiative, UEG reaffirms that it is continuing to gather signatures toward an August 12, 2010 deadline for placement on the 2012 ballot.
UEG Chair Kim Burningham notes that “we have 73,000 signatures in the bank and are now going after the balance of signatures in areas of the state where we did not meet the required numbers.” “We are determined to make it,” he added, and “believe enthusiastically that we will.”
Dixie Huefner, Communications Chair, observed: “When we submitted petitions to the county clerk to meet an April 15th deadline, we estimated that we had collected about ¾ of the number of signatures that were necessary to be on the 2010 ballot, a good showing, given the burdens placed on the initiative process by legislators.” “This estimate did not include electronic signatures that we had also collected but that the LG had ruled were not acceptable” she added.
Examining the count, UEG signature-gathering chief, Vik Arnold, noted that “in some Senate districts, the figures released were higher than our estimates, indicating that in the final days before April 15, some petitions were delivered directly to the clerks rather than to our office.” Continuing, he said that “the actual counts released yesterday also allowed us to estimate how many names had been discarded as duplicates or otherwise considered ineligible by the county clerks.”
“In some instances, discrepancies between our estimates and the actual counts suggest some lack of uniformity across counties, an issue with possible significance for legal action,” observed Alan Smith, UEG pro-bono attorney. “Uniform application of the law is required to provide equal protection to all of Utah’s registered voters who signed our petitions,” he explained.
UEG interprets the June 1 release of the figures as the LG’s determination that he was required to do so in order to establish that UEG’s initiative did not gather enough signatures to be placed on the November 2010 ballot. “In no way does release of the figures establish that we cannot be placed on the 2012 ballot if we gather the balance of required signatures before the termination of the year allowed by the state Election Code,” asserted Burningham. In UEG’s case, the year-long effort must be completed by August 12th to ensure placement on the 2012 ballot.
Ethics reform remains high on the list of concerns of Utah voters. Yet news reports suggest possible new attempts by the opposition to thwart the ability of UEG to have its initiative placed on the 2012 ballot. “These would be cynical moves on the part of the opposition to deny citizens the ability to exercise their right to legislate by initiative. We strenuously reject these attempts and will fight them in court if they emerge,” concluded Burningham.