The opinion, authored by Justice Noma Gurich, criticizes the 2025 Senate Bill 1027 as unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds, which protect the right to petition the government. She was joined by four fellow justices in what became a 5-4 decision.
In Oklahoma, citizens can do so through the initiative petition process.
Petitioners have 90 days to collect signatures from a required fraction of registered Oklahoma voters (8% to change state law and 15% to change the state constitution). If enough valid signatures are collected, the petition may appear on the ballot as a state question.
Last year, Oklahoma state lawmakers overhauled the process for gathering signatures on an initiative petition.
Senate Bill 1027 imposes restrictions on where signatures must be gathered. Under the 2025 law, no more than 10% of signatures on a petition could come from a county with more than 400,000 residents.
That only applies to two counties: Tulsa and Oklahoma. Under SB1027, those counties could contribute only 20% of a petition's signatures, despite being home to nearly 37% of Oklahoma residents.
The law also caps the number of voters who could sign an initiative petition based on how many people in that county participated in the most recent governor's election.
Five Oklahoma voters filed a lawsuit challenging SB1027. They said the caps would deny millions of Oklahomans the right to sign a petition.
"Oklahoma's initiative and referendum petition process is one of the hardest, if not the hardest, in the nation," the petitioners wrote in their lawsuit, citing the state's high signature threshold and superlatively short window for collecting signatures.
In the Oklahoma Supreme Court's opinion, Gurich wrote the caps violate the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.
"The supposed goal of incorporating more rural voters at the signature gathering stage would impose a significant burden on the right of petition," Gurich wrote. "The caps seek to achieve the inclusion of some by requiring the exclusion of others."
The court's decision strikes down SB1027 in its entirety, which includes additional restrictions on initiative petitions.
Only Oklahoma citizens can file initiative petitions, and only registered Oklahoma voters can sign them. But SB1027 blocked non-Oklahomans from donating to an initiative petition campaign or collecting signatures. It also required signature collectors to prominently display whether they were being paid and by whom.
Four justices voted against overturning SB1027. In the dissenting opinion, Justice Dana Kuehn wrote that while she believes some parts of the law don't comply with the Oklahoma constitution, they ultimately do not violate the U.S. Constitution.
"Citizens who want to sign an initiative or referendum petition are free to do so and are not stripped of any First or Fourteenth Amendment rights at the time of signing," Kuehn wrote. "Instead, when the signatures are ultimately counted, a certain number will be cutoff when the county threshold is met."
The Supreme Court's ruling will apply to future petitions but does not affect any ongoing efforts. According to the Oklahoma Secretary of State's website, all the initiative petitions filed since SB1027 passed have either been withdrawn by the petitioners or declared unconstitutional by the Supreme Court. The law did not apply to petitions filed before it took effect.
A separate law, 2024's SB 518, increases the amount of information that must be validated in an initiative petition signature. Currently, signatures are cross-referenced with voter rolls against the following information for an individual:
- Legal first name
- Legal last name
- Zip code
- House number
- Numerical month and day of birth
The law previously required three of those data points to be validated against voter data. SB 518 increased that to four. That change has fueled questions about an initiative petition to open Oklahoma's primary elections, placing all candidates on one ballot, regardless of party.
The Secretary of State deemed more than 57,000 signatures collected by organizers invalid under state law, barring the petition from going to voters. The Supreme Court has heard the case, but it has not yet issued a decision.
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