Activists watching civil union decision

SALEM – The recent decision by a federal judge to block a law allowing gay couples to form civil unions in Oregon has cast a spotlight on whether a signature on a petition can be equated to a vote on the ballot.

U.S. District Judge Michael Mosman on Friday suspended the law, set to take effect with the new year.

Mosman has set a Feb. 1 court date for lawyers to argue whether elections officials wrongly threw out signatures on petitions that would have forced a referendum vote on domestic partnerships.

The outcome of the case will be closely watched by political activists who claim Oregon elections officials are too quick to toss out petition signatures.

Elections officials are also paying close attention, concerned that an improbably high standard for verifying the validity of signatures could compromise their ability to carry out elections.

“This is not going to affect just this one referendum,” said Scott Moore, spokesman for Secretary of State Bill Bradbury. “This is going to affect the entire system.”

Bradbury’s Elections Division is at the center of a controversy over how the state came to its decision last fall that a petition drive to force a referendum vote on the domestic partnership law, House Bill 2007, had failed to produce enough valid signatures.

Initially, petitioners turned in 62,000 signatures. Then the state’s signature verification process kicked in. In the first cut, the state tossed 2,500 signatures because they were collected on sheets that weren’t properly filled out.

Then, a computer program generated two random samplings of signatures that were sent to counties to check against those on registration cards.

The counties concluded that 54 signatures didn’t match. An additional 47 signatures weren’t counted because they came from voters who were considered “inactive” because of their failure to vote in the previous five years or because their voter registration information hadn’t been updated.

Statistical research cited by the Elections Division has concluded that for each invalid signature found in a random sampling, 20 more signatures are similarly unacceptable.

So the 101 discounted signatures from the random samplings led to the rejection of 2,020 signatures – dropping the total to 96 short of the 55,083 signatures required.

The Arizona-based Alliance Defense Fund, which provides legal representation nationally on behalf of Christians’ religious liberties, took up the cause of domestic-partnership foes whose signatures were tossed out.

Thirty of the voters whose signatures were rejected joined in a federal lawsuit filed last month by the Alliance Defense Fund. The suit claimed that elections officials had violated their due-process and equal-protection rights under the U.S. Constitution.