The group which circulated the Oklahoma Civil Rights Initiative filed a motion with the state Supreme Court on April 4 to withdraw their initiative petition which would have prohibited government-sponsored race and gender preferences. The backers of the petition said they didn't believe it could withstand a challenge of signatures filed by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). The challenge filed on behalf of petition protesters, including state Reps. Mike Shelton (D-Oklahoma City) and Jabar Shumate (D-Tulsa), charged that the signature gathering process was riddled with errors.
The challenge was filed after the Oklahoma Supreme Court declared February 25 that the signatures on the initiative petition were numerically sufficient. The proposal needed a minimum of 138,970 valid signatures of registered voters get the proposed amendment to the state Constitution on the ballot. Secretary of State Susan Savage's office counted 141,184 petition signatures.
The motion to withdraw said that to survive the challenge, the validity rate for the signatures it collected would need to be in excess of 90 percent, "which is a statistical impossibility given historical validity rates." The group also said they did not want to waste the court's time or taxpayers' money on an effort that would likely fail.
Oklahoma City attorney W. Devin Resides, spokesman for the Oklahoma Civil Rights Initiative, previously said that referendum supporters initially hoped to gather more than 165,000 signatures to provide a cushion in case some signatures were invalidated. But, the group had difficulty reaching its goal because of the short deadline (90 days from when state officials certified the proposed ballot language in early September) and harassment by initiative opponents who tried to block petition circulators from gathering signatures.
It was also more difficult to recruit professional circulators who have traditionally been the backbone of petition drives because of the short time and high number of signatures required. It is illegal in Oklahoma for a person who is not a resident of the state to ask people to sign initiative petitions. An alleged failure to comply with this law is the basis for the ongoing criminal indictment by Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson against Paul Jacob, Susan Johnson and Rick Carpenter who were involved in the Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR) petition in 2006.
The American Civil Rights Coalition, which backed the Oklahoma campaign, is working to get similar measures on the ballot in four other states Arizona, Missouri, Nebraska, and New Mexico as part of what the group is calling "Super Tuesday for Equal Rights." In contrast to Oklahoma, their counterparts in the other four states had until spring or summer to gather signatures.
