Perched along a rural stretch of U.S. Highway 183 between Clinton and Woodward, Taloga is the state’s smallest county seat.
The Dewey County Courthouse, a Great Plains Bank branch and a handful of shops and convenience stores line the town’s main street, where passing motorists must slow to 25 miles per hour but aren’t required to stop at any intersection. Just after noon on March 6, about three cars per minute traveled through the town of 288 residents.
Far removed from the bustling shopping centers and entertainment venues of Oklahoma City and Tulsa, Dewey County isn’t a destination for initiative petition signature collectors. But a pending resolution in the Legislature, authored by a representative who believes the state’s method of direct democracy favors urban residents, would force organizers to Taloga and dozens of other rural communities across the state to get their question on the ballot.
House Joint Resolution 1054 by David Hardin, R-Stilwell, proposes a constitutional amendment to require initiative petition organizers to collect a percentage of signatures in all 77 of Oklahoma’s counties.
The resolution cleared the House Rules Committee on Feb. 20 and is pending before the full House. If approved in both chambers, the measure would appear before voters as a legislatively referred state question.
During committee debate, Hardin said the measure would give rural Oklahomans a greater voice on what appears on the ballot. Hardin, who served as Adair County Sheriff before being elected to the House in 2018, said he has never seen signature collectors in far eastern Oklahoma.
“If the effort had been made to come to rural Oklahoma, we might not be looking at this,” he said. “I think it will help democracy.”
Another measure cracking down on initiative petitions, House Bill 1105 by Speaker Charles McCall, R-Atoka, would mandate a $1,000 petition filing fee and increase the statutory protest period from 10 to 90 days. It would also require signature collectors to complete an OSBI background check.
Unlike HJR1054, McCall’s bill could become law without appearing before voters. It passed out of the House Rules Committee on a party-line vote and is eligible to be heard on the House floor.
Critics of the proposals say Oklahoma’s voter-led ballot initiative process, which has brought criminal justice reform, medical marijuana and Medicaid expansion to the state over the past decade, is already among the most stringent in the nation among states that allow direct democracy.
Under current criteria based on the 2022 gubernatorial election turnout, organizers have a 90-day window to collect 92,223 signatures for initiated statutes and 172,993 signatures for constitutional amendments. Requiring a percentage of signatures in every county would stretch petition organizer resources and favor campaigns bolstered by out-of-state money, said Cindy Alexander, founder of the democracy advocacy organization Indivisible Oklahoma.
“Where you live shouldn’t determine how important your voice is,” Alexander said. “And I reject the position that because more people live in urban areas their collective voice doesn’t count as much as the voice of those who live in less populated areas.”
Rep. Andy Fugate, D-Oklahoma City, said he fears the proposal would allow a handful of sparsely populated counties to “hold the state hostage” and keep a measure from appearing before voters.
“The reality is that we have five counties with less than 1,500 voters,” Fugate said. “These counties are going to have a complete override over whether the people can take matters into their own hands. We are going to centralize all of the legislative power in this body.”
House Majority Floor Leader Jon Echols, R-Oklahoma City, said a yes vote on the resolution was a “no-brainer” because it would go directly to the ballot for voters to decide.
In Dewey County, with a population of 4,448 residents, 1,767 voters cast ballots in the 2022 gubernatorial election. If House Joint Resolution 1056 took effect before the 2026 gubernatorial election, organizers would need to collect 141 signatures for an initiated statute and 265 signatures for a constitutional amendment.
Initiative campaign organizers typically aim to collect well above the required number of signatures in case some are challenged during the state’s verification process. For instance, the Yes on 820 campaign to legalize recreational marijuana submitted more than 164,000 signatures to the Secretary of State’s office
Walt Hill, a former Republican state lawmaker who served as House minority leader in the late 1980s, ran a successful initiative petition campaign in 1988 to statutorily require the regular legislative session to convene on the first Monday in February and adjourn on the last Friday in May. More than three-quarters of voters approved the constitutional amendment.
Hill, who represented a district spanning the panhandle, said he fears further restrictions on the ballot initiative process would kill all but the most well-funded efforts to get a question on the ballot. He said the original authors of the state constitution intended the ballot initiative to be a check of balance on the Legislature.
“You can’t kill the process just because you got a couple of bad bills that come in,” Hill said, referencing the successful voter-led campaigns to legalize medical marijuana in 2018 and expand Medicaid in 2020.
The push to add hurdles to the ballot initiative process comes as an effort to increase Oklahoma’s minimum wage nears the signature collection phase. The Oklahoma Supreme Court ruled on March 4 that a challenge from the Oklahoma Farm Bureau and State Chamber of Commerce was insufficient to keep State Question 832 from appearing on the ballot. The proposal, which organizers aim to have on the November general election ballot, would gradually increase the state’s minimum wage to $15 per hour by 2029 and tie future increases to the U.S. Department of Labor’s Consumer Price Index.
A handful of Democrat-authored measures to expand ballot initiative access, including a proposal to increase the signature collection timeframe from 90 to 180 days, were not heard before the Feb. 29 deadline for bills to pass out of committee and are effectively dead.
Note: This story was updated to clarify how joint resolutions reach the ballot.
Keaton Ross covers democracy and criminal justice for Oklahoma Watch. Contact him at (405) 831-9753 or Kross@Oklahomawatch.org. Follow him on Twitter at @_KeatonRoss.
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