Hurried effort leaves casino issue unresolved

Centennial teachers make the right choice

The Gresham Outlook, Jul 28, 2010

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It looks as if East County once again will dodge the question of whether a casino should be built in Wood Village. The news out of Salem on Tuesday was that backers of the casino had fallen just shy of collecting sufficient signatures to place one of their two proposed measures on the November ballot.

Although we oppose the casino, the failed signature campaign isn’t completely satisfying because it leaves this matter unresolved. Having come so close to obtaining the required number of signatures, it’s possible that the casino’s proponents will try again in 2012 – a full seven years after this idea first was suggested.

If the casino had proceeded to the ballot, the issue would have been decided once and for all – and the odds are that it would have been rejected in a statewide vote.

The casino will not go forward this year because the Oregon secretary of state’s office determined that more than 39 percent of the signatures submitted for one of the initiatives – a proposed constitutional amendment to allow a nontribal casino – were invalid. Sponsors of the initiative dispute the secretary of state’s findings and say they will try to overturn them.

Past experience shows that such an appeal or legal challenge isn’t likely to prove fruitful – unless casino proponents can provide irrefutable evidence of a mistake. A high error rate for these two initiatives isn’t totally unexpected. The casino backers gave themselves only two months to collect the 110,358 signatures of registered voters needed for a constitutional amendment and the 82,769 signatures required for a companion, statutory initiative. They started the campaign in early May and had to submit signatures by July 2.

With such limited time, employees of a paid petition-gathering firm had to rush to get every signature they could. And when people are in a hurry, they make mistakes. Thus, the secretary of state’s staff found numerous duplicate signatures and other obviously false signatures – including the person who simply signed the name “Satan.”

Whenever the secretary of state invalidates initiatives, proponents usually cry foul and blame the rejection on political motivations. But initiative campaigns, in general, should do a better job of ensuring the quality of their signature-gathering efforts. It’s not the secretary of state’s role to block initiatives from the ballot. But it is the job of that office to ensure that measures appearing on the ballot have fulfilled the minimal requirements set forth in Oregon law.

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