S.D. bill targets referendum concerns

[Ron Burgundy]

AP - The state House of Representatives has voted to make it illegal to pay people per signature in campaigns to gather enough support to get a measure on South Dakota's ballot.

The legislation, now headed to the Senate, was inspired by an unsuccessful petition campaign last year to eliminate judicial immunity in which critics say thousands of phony signatures were submitted.

State Rep. Mike Buckingham, who proposed the new law, said allowing payment for each signature collected on a petition is a temptation to fraud: People hired to gather signatures can pull names out of the phone book and fake signatures on petitions to make extra money, he said.

If the new law passes, petition carriers could still be paid by the hour or get a set salary, and a quota could not be set on the number of names they must obtain. It would also require petition circulators to be South Dakota residents.

"We're not limiting the ability to pay. We're just limiting the ability to pay a bounty," Buckingham said.

An analysis of petitions submitted last year by a California-based campaign seeking to strip judges of immunity for their official acts found more than 12,000 phony or illegitimate signatures, said Tom Barnett of the State Bar Association.

"There was George W. Bush. There was Roy Rogers. There was Dale Evans. There were people from out of state signing it," said Barnett.

Still, it was determined that enough legitimate signatures were collected to put the measure on the ballot. Only 11 percent of voters favored it on Election Day.

Four states — Ohio, Oregon, Wyoming and North Dakota — already have banned the practice of paying per signature, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Sponsors of initiatives in those states may pay someone by the hour or a flat fee for the service, however.

Federal courts have upheld the Oregon and North Dakota provisions but said similar measures in Idaho, Maine, Mississippi and Washington were unconstitutional, according to the state legislatures group.

An 1898 state constitutional amendment made South Dakota the first state to allow initiatives to enact laws and the referendum process to reject measures approved by state lawmakers.

These forms of direct legislation rest on the premise that lawmakers do not always adequately represent state residents and that people should be able to pass laws they desire and reject laws they oppose.

This has led to several interesting ballot issues over the years, such as a series of failed attempts to repeal the state video lottery system and the rejection of a huge landfill for out-of-state waste.

Petitioners succeeded in getting a divisive abortion law passed last year onto the November ballot, where voters rejected it by a margin of 56 percent to 44 percent.

source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070203/ap_on_re_us/signature_bounties [link]