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 Jennifer Garrison wants to clean up the petition circulating process in Ohio by overhauling laws that govern the way issues are placed before voters. She calls her plan the Ballot Integrity Act and said it’s needed to curb the increase in fraud and deception Ohio has experienced in recent ballot issue campaigns.
Ohio’s existing laws unfairly place the burden on low-level petition circulators who are hired to get the hundreds of thousands of signatures needed to qualify an issue for the ballot. Rep. Garrison wants to shift the responsibility to companies that hire and train the workers and wants to the Secretary of State to have new tools to police and safeguard our system of direct democracy.
If the changes are enacted, Ohio’s laws would serve as a national model.
The Ballot Integrity Act would:
- Require petition firms to obtain a license from the Secretary of State;
- Allow the Secretary of State to deny a license to companies that violated petition laws in Ohio or any other state;
- Allow the Secretary of State to revoke the license of a company that does not comply with state law;
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 Ballot Initiative Strategy Center (BISC) is an education non-profit and the nerve center for progressive ballot initiative campaigns across the country. Ballot Initiative Strategy Center’s website, www.ballot.org, is the most comprehensive, up-to-date, and user friendly place for information on ballot initiative campaigns.
One of the main components of our work is to advocate for an open and honest ballot initiative process. We strongly believe that all ballot measures campaigns—whether sponsored by conservative or progressive organizations, or petitioned through paid or volunteer signature gathering—should be required to play by the rules.
Starting in 2004, Ballot Initiative Strategy Center (BISC) began receiving numerous complaints across the states about abuses in signature gathering. Over the last three election cycles, there has been a dramatic jump in the use of signature fraud all across the country to qualify ballot initiatives. The problem has evolved from an unfortunate byproduct of the process to the standard operating procedure of the leading petition firms.
BISC has been a national leader in the effort to safeguard the citizens’ initiative process from being hijacked by those subverting democracy through illegal or misleading activity.
As a result of the dramatic increase in the number of states confronting initiative fraud and the growing volume of fraud in states that previously faced only a handful of cases, BISC launched www.stopballotfraud.org to track this growing threat to direct democracy.
The new website contains the most up-to-date research on the pattern of fraud and deception perpetrated by ballot measure sponsors who have a history of abusing the direct democracy process.
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Contents
State by State Report Card 11
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