Say Anything Blog

Last night I posted about the North Dakota Secretary of State’s office “flubbing” the ballot language of the initiated measure to cut North Dakota income taxes that will be on the ballot this November.  I jumped the gun on that a bit because it does appear as though the SoS’s office did have a valid reason for using the wording they did.  Whoever wrote the petition language for the Americans for Prosperity (the group that backed the signature-gathering to put the measure on the ballot) didn’t get one of the rates correct, and so the SoS’s office reflected that in the ballot language.

AFP is disputing that decision still, despite the typo on the petition, and has issued a press release about the matter today:

Bismarck, N.D. – Today, members of the Measure #2 Sponsoring Committee and Americans for Prosperity of North Dakota announce their objection to changes made to the Official Ballot Language for Measure #2 by Secretary of State Al Jaeger.

“We disagree with the new ballot language, and believe the ballot language that was approved by the Attorney General on July 17th, 2007 (attached) should stand.  The original version as approved by the Attorney General is the basis on which people’s decision to sign or not to sign was made,” Dustin Gawrylow, state policy director at Americans for Prosperity of North Dakota said.  “The original ballot title as written by the Attorney General was the intent of the sponsoring committee, it was the intent of the petition signers, and should be what the voters see on the November ballot.”

The ND Tax Department indicates that if the typographical errors would only impact 325 tax filers (out of 338,000 tax filers, less than one-one thousandth of a percent (0.001%) of the total).

Here’s the ballot language initially approved by the Secretary of State’s office as circulated on the petitions (the official petition can be viewed here in PDF format).

The ballot language now approved by the SoS’s office for the ballot voters will be using in November reads:

This initiated statutory measure would amend sections 57-38-30 and 57-38-30.3 of the North Dakota Century Code.

This initiated measure would amend sections 57-38-30 and 57-38-30.3 of the North Dakota Century Code for tax years beginning after December 31, 2008 by lowering the state corporate income tax rates by fifteen percent and the adjusted state income tax rates by fifty percent, except for one taxpayer bracket where the reduction would be forty-five percent and for two other brackets where some income would not be taxed.

So what does this all mean?  Well, for one it means that the American’s for Prosperity did circulate a petition with a typo.  It also means that the Secretary of State’s office didn’t notice the typo either when they wrote the initial ballot language which was also circulated on the petition.

The ballot language that most voters read (as someone who circulated petitions for this measure I can tell you that not many people read through all the arcane rate changes before signing).  Which means that most voters signed this petition based on the description of the measure by the petition circulator (and the circulators were calling it a 50% income tax cut across all tax brackets) and based on the initial ballot language the Secretary of State’s office wrote itself.

So what’s the solution?  I’m not sure.  Seems like both sides are guilty of a mistake here, but if it were up to me I’d side with the idea that most voters knew the intent of this measure was to cut all personal income tax rates by 50% and that to change that now based on a typo is a pretty silly thing to do.