An Oklahoma Supreme Court referee on Tuesday heard arguments in a case which could shape the future of the state’s initiative petition process.
Supporters of a state question that would let voters decide if the state’s primaries should be open challenged a determination by the Oklahoma Secretary of State that they failed to garner enough legal signatures to get it on the ballot.
Frederic Dorwart, an attorney for the state question, which would place all primary candidates on a single ballot, said the Secretary of State must explain why over 57,000 signatures were rejected.
Failure to do so imposes an “extraordinary burden” for supporters to be able to challenge the finding, Dorwart said.
Secretary of State Benjamin Lepak found that supporters of State Question 836 gathered 142,567 signatures, short of the 172,993 needed to get the proposed constitutional amendment on the ballot. Supporters said they turned in over 200,000 signatures.
Lepak, under a new law passed in 2024, determined 57,841 signatures did not match the required number of data points with the state’s voter registration rolls and tossed them out.
But the agency could not provide supporters of the state question with the specific reason each signature was deemed invalid.
The 2024 law requires at least 4 of 5 voter data points be verified for a signature to be valid, including legal first name, legal last name, zip code, house number, numerical month and date of birth. Previously, the law required 3 of 5 data points to be matched.
Dorwart said the question at hand is not whether 4 of the 5 data points were matched, but was the person signing the petition a legal voter.
He said the state’s high court should declare that the signatures are presumed valid and sufficient and place the issue on the ballot.
Trevor Pemberton, an attorney representing Lepak, said the Oklahoma Constitution requires that only registered voters can sign an initiative petition. He said the Legislature is within its rights to pass laws managing the existing process.
“They are asking you to create new law,” and for a do over, Pemberton said.
Over the years, lawmakers have passed new rules governing the initiative petition process that make it more difficult to get things on the ballot, such as putting geographical restrictions on how many signatures can come from certain counties.
Pemberton said state question supporters have the burden to establish the laws governing the process are unconstitutional.
Lepak’s office did more than just run the signatures through a computerized process, Pemberton said.
Mark D. Sanders, an attorney who argued in support of State Question 836, said the state’s founding fathers gave Oklahomans the right to create law independent of the Legislature.
While they gave the Legislature the power to regulate the process, they did not give the body the power to “extinguish” the initiative petition process.
If the courts allow the action to stand, they will have allowed the Legislature to be successful in ending the initiative petition process for everyone except “well-heeled interests,” Sanders said.
Supreme Court referee Meredith Wolfe will issue a report to the court. Her report is not binding on the court.
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