Somethign About Nuts and Tress and the Relative Distances at which They Fall

There is some talk of changing Oregon's initiative process to make it harder for certain interests to fraud their way onto the ballot. All well and good, except that the idea I've heard floated most often would involve discounting 10,000 petition signatures for every fraudulent one identified.

Even though our initiative process has been used for purposes not entirely friendly to the progressive agenda, doesn't mean that the process itself is broken. The fact that the right has been able to use the initiative process to advance its agenda should trouble the hell out of us. The fact that progressives dismiss the thought of using the process ourselves should be even more troubling. We are the ones who are supposed to have the people on our side.

Which is why any idea that involves invalidating legitimate signatures from legitimate voters, for whatever reason, makes me cringe. Okay it horrifies me. There have to be countless better ideas than this one, like actually signature matching all the signatures instead of just randomly sampling. I can't help but wonder how progressives would react if conservatives were proposing discounting 10,000 voter registration cards submitted by ACORN for fraudulent card. I can't imagine we'd think this was a good idea.

Ignoring the will of the voters is something that no progressive should advocate. We can educate and change minds, but we shouldn't ignore.