Opinion ID: 1132565
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: Verification of Signatures

Text: The Oregon Constitution sets forth the requirements for the initiative process. Oregon Constitution, article IV, section 1(4)(a) provides: Petitions or orders for the initiative or referendum shall be filed with the Secretary of State. Signatures of qualified voters on an initiative or referendum petition filed with the Secretary of State that have not been verified before the filing of the petition may be verified thereafter, but signatures not verified within the 15-day period after the last day on which the petition may be filed    shall not be counted. Article IV, section 1 contemplates that the bulk of the signatures will be verified before filing with the Secretary of State. The text clearly regards the Secretary of State's 15 day post-filing verification process as the exception, in order to accommodate later signatures which could not be verified prior to filing. Prior to amendment in 1968, the constitution specified no post-filing verification procedure. Statutes implementing the former constitutional provision required the Secretary of State to count only those signatures verified by county clerks before the petition was filed with the Secretary of State. ORS 254.040, Or. Laws 1965. This statute also imposed on county clerks the obligation to maintain a verification schedule of 200 signatures per day. In Kays v. McCall, 244 Or. 361, 418 P.2d 511 (1966), we held that signatures not verified by the county clerks as of the filing deadline would not be counted for purposes of determining whether the requisite number of signatures of legal voters appeared on the petition signature sheets. This provided an impetus for statutory and constitutional amendments. Article IV, section 1 now allows an additional period for verification of signatures by the Secretary of State within the 15 days following filing. Signatures not verified within this period may not be counted. The verification process itself is regulated by statute. As counsel for defendant Secretary of State describes it, the signature verification process now does not begin until the petition is filed with the Secretary of State. Then the entire signature verification process takes place within the 15 day period following filing. [3] Article IV, section 1(4)(b) contemplates the passage of laws to implement the provisions of section 1. ORS 250.105 directs the Secretary of State to designate by rule a statistical sampling technique to be used in the verification procedure. The Secretary of State has done so in OAR 165-14-030. By means of this sampling procedure, only a portion of the signatures are actually verified. By applying the statistical formula, the probable number of all valid signatures can be extrapolated. [4] The sampling technique was applied in this case. We do not suggest that the Secretary of State exceeded her authority when she established a verification process for the 15 day post-filing period. We note, however, that the substitution of sampling for actual verification provided in ORS 250.105 cannot be justified by the exigencies of attempting to compress the verification into the post-filing period. As we have pointed out above, the constitution presupposes that most signatures on petitions will be verified before they are filed. Signatures that have not been verified before the filing may be verified thereafter, but not later than 15 days after the deadline for filing petitions. Obviously the drafters of the 1968 amendment would not have used the verb may for this post-filing verification if they had not assumed that ordinarily the signatures would be verified before filing. They did not assume that there would be no way to secure verification before filing. The constitution does not expressly define verification or prescribe how and by whom signatures are to be verified. Article IV, section 1(4)(b). The legislature was left free to allocate the responsibility among the persons submitting a petition, the county clerks, the Secretary of State, or perhaps other officials. Statistical sampling may be used by the Secretary of State in determining whether the proportion of valid signatures submitted will exceed or fall short of the required number by such a wide margin that the result of individual verification cannot be in question. But statistical sampling cannot foreclose a procedure that lets persons who circulate petitions (or those who oppose the petitions) secure actual pre-filing verification of signatures that are submitted sufficiently in advance of the deadline to make individual verification possible. [5]