endum has developed in this state, and in
other states, is the abuse that comes about,
not by those who seek to mobilize the
people to overturn an act of the legisla-
ture, but primarily by those who seek to
delay the effectiveness of an act of the
legislature.
It is in recognition of these proper pur-
poses of referendum, and of this danger
of abuse, that the minority has submitted
a Minority Report and joins in presenting
to you this proposal.
As you will note from the first para-
graph of the proposal, it involves striking
out a total of three words and inserting
in lieu thereof a total of five words. I hope
that this net addition of two words to the
entire constitution in this manner will not
offend those who wish to see the constitu-
tion kept short.
The effect of striking out three words
would be to increase both the time avail-
able for preparing and presenting to the
voters a referendum petition and the num-
ber of signatures involved in such a peti-
tion.
The use of the different base, what we
have done is simply to provide that instead
of five percent of the gubernatorial vote,
what you will need is five percent of the
number of registered voters as of the time
of the last gubernatorial election. The use
of the different base would increase the
number of signatures required.
We would hope that as more and more
people who have registered take the oppor-
tunity to vote, that perhaps this difference
may be modified somewhat.
It also increases the number of days
available for preparing a referendum peti-
tion from sixty days to ninety days. The
consequence of these two changes we feel,
and we urge upon you, is to shift the em-
phasis and the availability of the referen-
dum away from those who are highly or-
ganized, who have their lobbyists here, who
can follow the preparation of a bill, and
the time that the bill is signed, who can go
into action and have the money available
to go into immediate action. It will make
it somewhat less available to those people,
because they have to gather more signa-
tures, but the added time will make it more
available to those people who are not the
highly organized body, those people who
are involved in a movement of the people,
who have to take a while to get themselves
organized after a bill is enacted, who can,
when they have had an opportunity to edu- |
cate the people as to what is happening,
get a great deal of response, but who
generally nowadays find that sixty days
rushes up at them with the result that they
cannot possibly get sufficiently organized
within the 60 days.
These people, the people in general, as
distinguished from those who are highly
organized with the lobbyists, these people
have a greater availability of the use of
the referendum.
There was a second purpose to our
amendment, a second major purpose. As I
indicated before, it seemed clear to us that
the greatest abuse of the referendum in
this State and its potential for the future
in this State, as well as elsewhere, is in
the use of the referendum to suspend the
effect of legislation.
The effect of our amendment would in-
crease the number of signatures that must
be presented within thirty days in order
to suspend the effect of legislation. In
other respects it would be the same as the
Committee Report. However, we suggest
that it will make it less tempting to use
this referendum procedure, to misuse this
referendum procedure, in order to suspend
legislation.
Our Minority Report contains a quota-
tion from a recent unanimous decision of
the Court of Appeals, a decision which con-
sidered the drastic effect of suspensions as
one of the important elements in the back-
ground in construing what the meaning
of the referendum language is. I suggest
that this importance of the effect of sus-
pension is something that you too should
consider. You should not make it easy to
suspend the action of the legislature.
The third reason we have submitted this
amendment, which changes the base upon
which this five percent is calculated, is, to
add a bit of additional rationality and
practicality to the referendum procedure.
At the present time, when you have a hot
election, a lot of people getting out to vote,
automatically for the next four years the
referendum petition signature requirements
are increased and increased substantially.
The 1966 gubernatorial election figures
totaled approximately twenty percent more
than the 1962 gubernatorial election fig-
ures. As a result, even with no change, the
referendum requirement would be increased
by twenty percent.
Obviously, the number of registered
voters out of whom one must get these
signatures has not increased by 20 percent. |
