ND Senate Says Petition Circulators Must Be Citizens For Two Years First

We all remember the scandal last year around two initiated measures that were kept off the statewide ballot by petition fraud committed by a group of NDSU football players. That has inspired a number of proposals for reforming the initiated measure process, including SB2183 which got a vote in the Senate today.

Here’s the floor debate, it passed by a 31-16 vote.

The bill is pretty straight forward. If it becomes law, you would have to be a qualified elector (18 years old) and a citizen of the state for two years before you could circulate a petition.

Which means, essentially, that out-of-state groups couldn’t fly in armies of petitioners to get an issue on the ballot.

Given the problems we’ve had with initiated measures in the state, this seems like a common sense reform.