On The Record
So, yesterday I put out the call for more bigots to sign the official state bigot registry (read: anti-homosexual ballot referendum petitions). As it turns out, for all intents and purposes, someone is making one. But in response to Dave Lister’s concerns about the project, I have some questions.
The information at issue — the petition signatures — are a matter of public record, so I’m curious to know just where people draw the line.
Would scanning the petition sheets and posting pdf documents online be wrong? If so, why? If not, why is the extra step of culling the data into a more usable and readable format wrong?
Should public information be difficult to get to, or easy to get to?
We push for more transparency and accountability when it comes to things such as lobbyist reporting, and the press routinely breaks down such reports into more easily understood names and numbers.
We push for more transparency and accountability when it comes to campaign contributions, and such reporting now has to be done relatively quickly so the public can see who is funding campaigns and candidates.
Is there some inherent and particular reason why there should be a different philosophy or approach when it comes to individuals signing referendum petitions?
Addendum: How many Oregonians, do you think, understand that their petition signatures are a matter of public record?
I suspect that a large number of people don’t know that it’s a matter of public record. And I’ll bet that some of the reaction to this particular counter-effort will include people complaining that it must be violating some sort of law to out their signatures in this way.
The problem here, perhaps, isn’t with the counter-effort, but with people’s lack of understanding about the petition process itself.
I wonder how many people would stop signing petitions once it was brought to their attention that it’s not some sort of secret ballot.
Addendum: In the interest of, well, transparency and accountability, I should point out that it’s a long-standing and well-known pet peeve of mine (established back in the debate before, during, and after Measure 36) that I can’t stand it when people won’t call a bigot a bigot, and call the mushy middling folk accomplices to bigotry.
August 15th, 2007 at 11:30 am
The primary thing that troubles me is the assumption of motive.
People sign ballot qualification petitions for lots of reasons, and not necessarily because they support the measure. For instance, when I was (much) younger I used to sign petitions even for measures I intended to vote against, because I thought the initiative system was worth supporting, or because I thought the issue was something that reallly should be decided by the voters. I’ve become much more cautious about signing petitions over time, but youthful optimism and faith in democracy is – one hopes – an ever-refilling fountain in the population at large.
A project like the one proposed isn’t going to exclusively reveal the names of “bigots”; it’s going to lump genuine bigots in with a bunch of people who signed the petition for reasons other than actually supporting the measure. Nor will it catch the bigots who did not sign the nomination petition, but sill voted for the measure. This effort will therefore produce an unknowable (but probably large) number of both false positives and false negatives, and will therefore be pretty unreliable.
I seriously doubt people will keep that important caveat in mind when using the data, especially when the process spreads to all contentious ballot measures and that data is used in attacks on candidates many years later. Imagine this smear from the year 2020: “In 2008, Mr. Frankonis wanted to increase your taxes!”
Is that a good outcome? I don’t think so.
My other objection is that, like the odious HB2614 of 2005, this effort is rooted in a specious conflation of the nomination process with the voting process. I really don’t care for that either.
It’s probably inevitable, but I don’t think it’s actually a good idea.
August 15th, 2007 at 12:44 pm
I used to do the same thing, sign anything and everything. So, I get that. But I also think there are some proposals for which the only right action is to refuse to assist in any way.
Bigotry, I think, is one of those proposals. Anyone who signs this is aiding and abetting the opportunity for Oregonians to vote to institute, yet again, bigotry under the law.
I don’t think anyone should get some sort of “I sign anything” safe harbor for that.
August 15th, 2007 at 11:36 pm
Well yes, but anyone who signs this is also aiding and abetting the opportunity for Oregonians to give a crushing electoral defeat to proposed bigotry under the law.
Treating this nomination process as a vote-in-favor is specious, because we don’t know and can’t tell why someone wanted to put the measure up for a vote. They may want to see such a thing go down hard and even believe that it actually would. (Just because they’re deluded doesn’t mean they can’t also be on our side.)
The data being gathered doesn’t match the question you’re wanting to answer. Any answer you get to your question (“who are the bigots?”) from this data set will be misleading at best.
I realized that I did not earlier answer your actual question: Yep, it’s a public record and it should be available to the public. Once it’s available at all, how available is pretty much moot…. OCR is (relatively) cheap. Despite my opinion that it’s a bad idea to use the data in the manner proposed – it’s going to be misrepresented as something other than it actually is – I still think that’s insufficient reason to make the data unavailable to the public.