Issue date: 11/28/07 Section: News

Outside the University Union, Joe Rodriguez signs a petition for Jason Maxwell. Many people come to the Union to gather signatures and talk to students about various things. [Click to enlarge]

Over the past few weeks, employees of various petition gathering companies have been on campus gathering signatures for ballot initiatives relating to funding for construction projects at children's hospitals, regulation of eminent domain and the distribution of California's electoral votes in presidential elections.

Some of the people gathering signatures aren't as passionate about their causes as some students think.

"We're actually just petitioners, we go all around California," said Shawn Buie, who is part of one of the teams gathering signatures for Discovery Petitions.

A job listing for the company on FlipDog.com reads "Since 1987, Discovery
Petition has run ballot initiative campaigns for any group that had the money to pay for it. And right now, the money is great!"

The amount of money paid to petition gatherers varies depending on the issue.

"A lot of them are only 50 cents or 75 cents (per signature), then sporadically
they'll throw some in there for three or four dollars," Buie said. "It depends on who is pushing it, if it's a good petition or a bad petition."

According to the California Secretary of State's website, the initiative dealing
with eminent domain needs 694,354 signatures to make the ballot, while the Children's Hospital Bond Act needs 433,971. The number of signatures needed is based on how many people voted in the prior election and if the initiative is a bond measure or constitutional amendment.

Junior biology major Alexandra Thayer said she didn't know the petitioners were paid employees.

"That really doesn't surprise me (though)...most of the ballots are supported by private industry anyway," Thayer said.

Buie said that unlike others, he only collects signatures for petitions he believes in.

"A lot of (petition gatherers) don't really read what they're pushing," he said.

Government professor Kimberly Nalder said she thinks students need to be more aware of the initiative process.

"We like to think they are activists who are really concerned about the cause, which sometimes is true, but most of the time they are getting paid to do this," she said.

Nalder said the initiative process started in the 1910s as a way to give more power to the people in response to concerns about corporate interests dominating the legislator.

"Ironically, it's been turned on its head," Nalder said. "The big companies...get their way by buying the peoples' votes instead of having to work through the legislator. It's actually easier in some ways to get us to do it than to get the legislator to do it."

Kellen Arno of Arno Political Consulting, Inc., the company collecting signatures for the children's hospital construction and eminent domain initiatives, thinks the initiative process is a good thing.

The eminent domain initiative seeks to regulate the process by which the government can seize private property for public use, such as roads and schools, and is supported by farmers and other land owners concerned about their property rights, Arno said.

He gave an example of the way the initiative process has worked in California
in the past.

"Whenever I go to (a restaurant in) a state like Virginia and they ask (if I want to sit in the) smoking or not smoking (section), it always weirds me out being from California ... it was the initiative process that put an end to smoking in California (restaurants)," Arno said. "I don't know if the legislators would have had the nerve to stand up to tobacco lobbyists to (pass) that."

Arno said while the petition gatherers on campus are working on behalf of his company, they actually work for other companies that Arno Political Consulting, Inc. hired to gather signatures for them.

"There (are) probably about eight, what I would consider actual, companies like (Discovery Petitions) that we subcontract with," Arno said. "They're the firms that we (hire) to logistically set up getting the signatures into our office."

Setting policy and laws through the initiative process can have unintended consequences.

"More often than not, (through the initiative process), you get either bad policy that's purposely so that somebody with a particular interest has paid for," Nalder said. "Or...unintended consequences, where the intent was good but people didn't think about...the implications...because it didn't go through the regular law-making process...of checks and people looking at the process."

Arno and Nalder agreed that the initiative process is often abused, with corporate interests misleading the public or hiding their support for a bill.

"There (are) definitely instances when Wal-Mart will create a committee to conceal the fact that they are running it," Arno said.

Arno described his clients' pushing of the eminent domain and construction for children's hospitals issues as committees with shared goals, not deceptive corporate interests.

The process of getting an initiative on the ballot doesn't run cheap.

"Just the cost of printing the paper can be hundreds of thousands of dollars for any given campaign," Arno said. "Typically (getting an initiative on the ballot can cost) anywhere from $2 to $4 (million) for a statewide issue here in California."

Nalder thinks it is time for some reform of the initiative process.

"Ideally, we shouldn't be tricked into making policy in this state. It should be on the up and up, and ideally (petition gatherers) would be volunteers," Nalder said. "It might be worthwhile for Californians to think about what we want out of our initiative process and maybe think about an initiative that requires signature gathers not get paid."

Avi Ehrlich can be reached at aehrlich@statehornet.com.

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