In short, it’s a bad sign

LITTLE ROCK — Are you following this debacle of failed and fraudulent petition drives for ballot initiatives in Arkansas?

Petitioners are coming up comically short. It turns out that they have routinely submitted more bogus signatures than valid ones.

At one point, it appeared we might face an abundance of publicly initiated ballot issues in the statewide general election in November.

Now it appears that we may encounter none.

The groups looking best right now are the two that joined forces to offer the ethics initiative. They acknowledged the insufficiency of their number of signatures and didn’t submit anything to the secretary of state.

All of this ought to cause us to give overdue consideration to a basic question: Is it proper to pay people to deliver for us the right to engage in our own democracy?

I asked Sheffield Nelson a related question Tuesday: Considering his spectacularly failed effort-that used a professional canvasser-for a natural gas severance tax, did he believe that the modern professional canvassing industry had evolved into something sleazy?

“Yes,” he said without hesitation.

So I asked him what he thought of an idea: How about changing our constitutional law to prohibit the paying of money to obtain signatures for initiative petitions?

What if we relied, by law, only on publicly spirited volunteers engaging in the noblest grass-roots politics?

What if, in exchange for that, we reduced the number of signatures required?

“It’s a great idea,” Nelson said.

Brent Bumpers, a leader of the ethics effort, was a tad less effusive. He said of the idea: “I like it as well as anything else I’ve pondered.”

The problem is simple. Money corrupts.

There are legitimate firms that contract in multiple states to produce petition signatures for ballot initiatives. There are itinerant followers of these firms who bound from state to state circulating petitions for this issue and that, sometimes for several issues at once.

Some energetic and resourceful guy looking to make real money might have come at you recently with three or four petitions-for ethics, for natural gas taxes, for medical marijuana and for a casino.

The real sleaze arises in what is a kind of exponential process-that is, when these paid canvassers start hiring local subcontractors, meaning regular folks in the hinterlands who are jobless and looking for a few bucks.

Apparently, the temptation becomes too great to phony up fraudulently notarized names for dollars, the more the merrier.

If you turn in a gross number of signatures exceeding the requirement, then you get an overtime period for further collections if your valid number is short.

That’s the case no matter how brazenly bogus your gross number.

But if you know your petitions are insufficient and you don’t turn them in to the secretary of state, then you’re done.

This is an increasingly absurd, offensive and dishonorable process.

Yet the biggest failing is fundamental: Direct democracy, meaning the attempted making of laws by the people themselves using this initiative process, ought not to be for sale.

Committed people working hard and organizing themselves smartly in citizen armies ought to be the ones providing the premium activism in our political culture. And it is that premium activism that ought to be elevated and made responsible and accountable.

In exchange, we could cut in half the required signatures, now 10 percent of the most recent governor’s race turnout for constitutional amendments and 8 percent for initiated acts.

We might get fewer ballot initiatives that way. That might not be bad. We would have quality control.

Changing this process would require amendingthe state Constitution. It would be infinitely better for the Legislature to refer the change to the voters.

It would be odd hiring paid canvassers to produce signatures on petitions to outlaw themselves.

But I’m sure we could find people willing to fabricate signatures for just that purpose, or any other.

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John Brummett is a regular columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com.