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SCOTUS Rules Petiton Signatures Are Public Record
Reader SheeEttin reminds us that back in October, the Supreme Court accepted a case testing whether or not petition signers' names could be kept anonymous. (The premise was that the act of signing a petition is covered by free speech, and thus signers are entitled to anonymity, especially to protect them from harassment.) Now the Court has issued its ruling: signatures are part of the public record. "By a strong majority Thursday, the Supreme Court issued a setback for opponents of gay marriage who wanted to keep their identities secret. The justices favored transparency over privacy in a case testing whether signing a petition is a public act. The case began with a bill that the Washington state legislature passed in 2009, expanding the state's domestic partnership law. The new referendum was known as 'everything but marriage' for the enhanced rights it gave same-sex couples. People who opposed the bill gathered 120,000 signatures for a ballot measure asking voters to repeal it. That measure eventually reached Washington voters, who upheld 'everything but marriage.' Those who signed the repeal petition feared that they would be harassed if their names became public, so they went to court challenging Washington's Public Records Act. They argued that signing a petition is speech that is protected from disclosure. But in Thursday's 8-1 ruling, the Supreme Court disagreed. 'Such disclosure does not, as a general matter, violate the first amendment,' Chief Justice John Roberts wrote for the court."
I have a question then. Since the VOTE is a public action too, does this ruling means that voting signatures should be public too? And don't get me wrong, but i really want to know who voted for who....
No, Voting should remain as it is, you have to prove your ID and sign-in to vote, so that no one person can vote twice (their vote and yours). But who you vote for should not be a matter of public record. Petitions while related to voting do not carry the same weight as a vote, and names need to be verified to show that X number of people did in fact sign the petition.
"Anyone who trades liberty for security deserves neither liberty nor security" --Benjamin Franklin
Does that purpose outweigh the very real possibility of harassment?
Harassment builds character. As other people have stated, if a person feels strongly enough to go on the record in support of something, they should do so knowing that at some point they may have to actually stand up for their beliefs. As a country we seem to spend a lot of time protecting ourselves from each other. We constantly turn to third parties, rather than dealing directly with each other. At some point, everyone has to drum up the courage to look another human being in the eye and say, "You can take your ignorance and go fuck yourself."
The whole point of petitions and voting and change revolves around standing up for yourself or others. It involves doing what you believe in. Standing up for a belief often times bring grief, especially when that belief lies far enough outside of the mainstream. Change often times hurt. The more extreme the change, the more likely there will be negative reprocussions.
In response to your questions about what good public disclosure serves, it serves the purpose of shining light on a cause. It shows the rest of society just how many people are willing to stand up for their beliefs. As Ghandi said, "First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. THEN THEY FIGHT YOU. Then you win." There are plenty of laws on the books to deal with harassment. Harassment may be effective for limited times in certain circumstances. In the long run, the harassers will get theirs.
Harassment sucks. I'm not trying to minimize that fact. As a human being, you can't hide behind anonyminity. You have to face your harassers and overcome them. Often times the best way to do it involves simply ignoring them. "Sticks and stones..." and all that. Communities form for reasons. A sad fact of human beings seems to be that we will never always get along with everyone else. There will always be division and strife. Band together with those who are of like mind.
How does not making these signatures part of the public record prevent the elections office from verifying them?
Are they going to verify that they exist, or that they signed them? I'm just thinking it'd give people a chance to say "I didn't sign this!" I'm going to be honest here, I watch too much Simpsons. I'm imagining dead people 'signing' these petitions.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, the LOGS of who voted - not what they voted for - ARE public record. I can tell which elections you voted in; it's public record that you voted - just not who you voted FOR.
A vote is a decision. A petition signature is a public, open attempt to submit an issue to the voters.
Petition signatures need to be public. The number one electoral fraud in this country is falsification of petiition signatures. Hotly contested races will hire outside firms to verify petition signatures on a routine basis, and this is necessary in any adversarial system.
Usually only a small number - 1-5% of registered voters - is required to put a measure or candidate on the ballot, which then leads to a secret vote.
Democracy has risks. If there's any issue that can't muster between one and five percent of people willing to take a public stand on an issue than we're already doomed.
Also, signing a petition is NOT necessarily an endorsement of an issue or candidate. It is merely a declaration that a person feels an issue is worthy of a vote. It usually - but not always - indicates a signer supports an issue. I have signed petitions for candidates who I did not support simply because the candidate I DID support was already on the ballot but I thought the opposing candidate had a right to be heard.
I live in the Seattle area. Among my hobbies and avocations are community theater and gay rights, even though I am straight. I am for same sex marriage (actually, I'm for getting government getting out of the business of licensing marriage and getting religion out of the business of defining it), I've performed them, gratis. However, I have a hard time with this. The more vocal of the gay community were trying to bully state voters who were opposed to a bill that would provide almost all the benefits of marriage to gay couples.
I routinely sign petitions that, even if I disagree with the premise, I believe deserves a fair airing in public. As a result of this action, I had a minor break with some of my gay friends who were very angry and wanted the names of all the signers.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
None of that matters. The fact is, the signatures on any petition should be made available for public scrutiny and so they can be verified. I was part of a campaign that stopped a petition in my home state when we caught them doing a lot of underhanded things that the local bureaucrats turned a blind eye too.
And, on the reverse end, I had a petition I was an active member of have the same thing happen to it (we won though because we weren't dirty) but it's nice when your opposite looks at it and has to concede to the fact that you did indeed get enough legitimate signatures.
I have to be honest, as someone who has worked as a political activist and had everything from death threats to vandalism occur, I don't want to work with people who aren't willing to do the same. If a particular belief isn't worth taking grief from cowards, it's not that important to you. Stand up for what you believe or sit down, shut up and play the part of a domesticated animal. People who only get involved when it's safe are just as cowardly as the haters and will ultimately get their just deserts.
I would be interested in sources that support your claims. The history as I understand it was that the majority of people in the colonies at the time were sympathetic to independence, with less than a fifth being loyalists, and less than that being truly neutral. The reason that more people didn't volunteer for the Continental Army was simply that the pay and provisioning was meager and sporadic, and life in the colonies was for most tenuous and near subsistence. People largely could not afford to abandon their work and their families to go off and harry the British. I would not call that cowardice of any color.
I support the Slashcott and will not be reading or commenting from 2/10/14 to 2/17/14. Beta is steaming pile of dog shit
Good question.
Market theory is premised on perfect knowledge, perfect competition, and rational deciders. As it turns out, all of those premises are wrong, more or less. (They are each somewhat true, but less so than untrue. That's why reality somewhat matches the theory, but less so than not.)
Imperfect knowledge: If you want to go to a bar, but you only know about smokey bars (maybe because there are only smokey bars), then you will sigh and go to a smokey bar. You have no choice.
Imperfect competition: Maybe there is a non-smokey bar, but other qualities of a bar make it preferable to you. So you sigh and go to the bar which you otherwise prefer, despite the smoke.
Irrational decision: Maybe you never really thought about bars being smokey, like you just assume they all have smoke and that's the price of admission. The thought literally never occurred to you to choose a non-smokey bar.
My guess is that it is the first of those: almost all bars were smokey, so there was hardly any choice to be made. People wanted to go to a drinking establishment, and that meant going to a smokey bar.
I relate this to food labeling. Americans like their food labels, so why did it take legislation to get them? Why didn't the market provide food labels? Think about it: if you walked into a grocery store and none of the food was labeled, would you walk out and starve to death? No, you would just buy the available food. That's a failure of market theory -- basically because market theory isn't very good at matching reality.