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Post Office Box 1147
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Marblehead, Massachusetts 01945
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“Every Tax is a Pay Cut ... A Tax Cut is a Pay Raise”
47 years as “The Voice of Massachusetts Taxpayers”
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their Institutional Memory — |
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CLT UPDATE
Wednesday, December 8, 2021
Petition Drives: An
After-Action Analysis
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Far too many think
running a statewide petition signatures drive is easy. All they're
aware of is that it's been done so many times before that it can't be
all that hard. Boy, they couldn't be more wrong.
It is the hardest thing I've ever done in my life
— and
I've got fourteen petition drives behind me accomplished over the
past 36 years. I don't want to ever be in charge of leading another
in this lifetime or the next. The fact is, only a rare few that
start the petitioning marathon ever reach the finish line.
. . . If history is any
guide, most of the 17 initiative petitions that the attorney general
cleared to circulate will not succeed in garnering the signatures needed
to move forward. Over the past 20 years, no more than four
citizen-sponsored initiatives have made it to the ballot in any
election. The vast majority of would-be ballot measures are
derailed before they ever get to the voters. Incredibly, in the 102
years since the right of initiative and referendum was added to the
Massachusetts Constitution, only 84 citizen petitions were ultimately
brought to a vote of the people — and only 38 were enacted....
The
Boston Globe
Sunday, October 17, 2021
Why Beacon Hill resents ballot activists
By Jeff Jacoby
For over two years I'd been representing
CLT in Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance's multi-state
opposition alliance to stop Massachusetts from
participating in the Transportation & Climate Initiative
(TCI) multi-state compact to jointly raise the tax on gas
and diesel fuels — aka, "Baker's Boondoggle." On
August 5 when informed that Paul Craney and MassFiscal had
filed their petition to stop Massachusetts from joining TCI I
told him via e-mail:
Great move Paul, quite a surprise
this morning!
I’m sure you must know what you’re
getting yourself into with a statewide petition drive or
have a pretty good idea. Have you ever been
involved in one before? If not, prepare to give up
sleep for the duration of signature-collecting, the
deliveries-and-pickups with municipal clerks, totaling
the counts, and delivery to the SoS (and potential
challenges before the state ballot law commission for
months when you succeed), in both the initial round and
the no-doubt subsequent round in the spring. That
is, of course, unless you’re using paid petitioners. (In
the dozen or so I’ve been consumed by, I/we always
depended entirely on volunteers.)
Don’t hesitate to call on me if I
can be of any advice with this effort. There’s not
much if anything pertaining to statewide initiative,
referendum, or constitutional amendment petitions drives
I haven’t experienced over my 3-plus decades of activism
—
even to winning on the ballot only to have the
Legislature or courts ignore or overturn the results.
The first of many hurdles of course
is AG Healey, though I can’t see on what grounds she can
disqualify your petition —
not that this hasn’t inexplicably happened before, then
it’s off to court next.
After
deciding that a high-priced petition signature collection company
was cost-prohibitive, MassFiscal decided to join up with
Wendy Wakeman of the MassGOP, who was running the signature
drives for
two other petitions: One for requiring Voter ID
and the other for "Born Alive newborn protection."
This would be her first time running a statewide petition
drive as well. It
was thought by both groups that there would be
more strength in volunteer petitioner numbers by combining efforts.
. . . With the field of 2022 ballot questions whittled down to just
three topics, voters have a clearer sense of which issues will
generate substantial debate -- and even more spending -- over the
next year.
The app-based driver ballot question will build on an intense and
expensive campaign cycle in California, where Uber, Lyft and
DoorDash last year collectively spent more than $200 million
successfully advocating for a similar measure known as Proposition
22.
Those three companies and Instacart are funding the Coalition for
Independent Work pushing the Massachusetts ballot question, which
would declare all app-based drivers to be independent contractors
and not employees ...
Both other campaigns that submitted
signatures to Galvin's office used paid signature-gatherers. [Massachusetts
Package Store Association] Executive Director Robert Mellion
said his group hired Signature Drive at a rate of $5 to $8 per
signature, while the Coalition for Independent Work did not provide
details about the paid vendor it used....
The dental benefits question seeks to apply a profit limit on dental
insurance companies similar to those in place on medical insurers,
according to Mouhab Rizkallah, chairman of the ballot question
committee.
Rizkallah said the campaign paid more than $500,000 on
signature-gatherers and submitted 104,000 validated signatures with
Galvin's office.
State House News Service
Wednesday, December 1, 2021
Deadline Whittles Ballot Question Field to Three Campaigns
Voter ID, Happy Hour Initiatives Don't Make Cut
I warned Paul and
Wendy to prepare for the most grueling, challenging ordeal of their
lives; that once they took on leading a statewide petition drive, to
succeed they would need to surrender every single bit of their lives for the next
two or three months, if they were able to collect more than enough
signatures to discourage a months-long signatures challenge
at the end. Days, nights, weekends, holidays, family- and
life-events would all need to come to a screeching end, just working through
them. There would be no clocking in and clocking out, no time
off. There would not be a moment that belonged to them until
the drive was over and the signatures were submitted, and every
second of those months would demand their full attention and then
some under the relentless pressure of a looming and immutable
deadline.
On
September 15 at 1:02 AM I sent this further warning to Paul
Craney and Wendy Wakeman:
"For the
record, I do worry about any petition succeeding with
multiple petitions being presented simultaneously.
Holding a potential signer’s attention for that long
will be daunting for all petitioners and petitions.
It’ll be interesting to see the results. Maybe
you’ve found a way to pull it off, and that’s my hope.
I included historical examples of both collecting signatures for
only a single petition and why it's recommended, and what happens if you come close
but don't quite make it, from CLT's and my past efforts:
A PROMISE TO KEEP: 5%
A Ballot Committee of Citizens for Limited Taxation & Government
September 11, 1997
*** Clarification of Policy ***
http://cltg.org/cltg/cltg97/cltgclarification.html
I recently received the following e-mail from one of our
longstanding members and realize there might be some confusion among
our membership. The message follows:
Barbara,
I got your card
which might be read as telling CLT people not to help other
friendly groups. Since there are so few of our type of people in
Mass., it seems to be a mistake to tell the same group of people
who will be getting signatures for terms limits and tax
reduction not to help each petition drive.
My response follows:
The vote of the
CLT&G board of directors was not to preclude individuals from doing
as they see fit – after all, our members are volunteers, not
employees we'd even consider ordering around.
It was to preserve
CLT&G's resources and volunteers' efforts, and help insure our own
success.
In 1996, while we
were engaged in the petition drive to repeal the legislators'
pay-grab, we started helping out a little with the Free the Pike and
Auto Excise Tax Repeal drives. Gradually we got pulled in more and
more, almost without notice. Before the filing deadline, we were
providing more support than we could afford -- in fact we ended up
picking up everyone else's petitions all across the state because
they didn't have the manpower to retrieve their certified petitions
themselves.
We also provided
them with space at the malls where we'd reserved a table -- drawing
criticism from some of the mall management for having more petitions
there than we'd contracted with them to have, a minor violation of
our agreement with the management.
Ever driven to
Woronoco, Pittsfield, Peru or Florida, Massachusetts to pick up
certified petitions from the town clerks? Let me know if you'd like
to in November and I'll arrange it!
Now if our purpose
in this life was to run petition drives, that would be fine and well
-- but we'd be charging what the professionals charge -- and we're
talking hundreds of thousands of dollars per issue! But we're not in
it for that. We're in it to win our issue, and we spend one hell of
a lot of time and our members' money to succeed.
I got a call Friday
from the Parental Rights Initiative. They wanted to "pool our
resources," "help each other out." When I asked how many petitioners
they had, I was told "about twenty"! As in the past, we've found
that, for too many, petitioning looks easy from arm's length -- and
we've probably had something to do with that through our successes
over the decades. But too often, when the rubber meets the road, we
get the inevitable calls to bail them out. We thought it was only
fair this time to let everyone know from the outset that those days
have passed.
Petition drives are
anything but easy. We'll have our hands full again trying to be one
of the groups that cross the finish line. (In 1996, 18 petition
drives were launched: two made it, and we were one of them, barely.)
If you want to help
the others, you're of course perfectly free to do so. But this time
CLT&G will be focusing our members' resources and all our energy on
succeeding with our own drive. That elusive finish line is still
quite a distance off!
I hope this helps
you to understand our new position.
Chip Ford
Co-Director
A
PROMISE TO KEEP: 5%
A Ballot Committee of Citizens for Limited Taxation & Government
*** Promise Update ***
Thursday, December 4, 1997
http://cltg.org/cltg/cltg97/cltg120497_3.html
Greetings activists on this glorious day of success!
Oh
sure, if you read the newspapers or watch the TV news reports, the
glass is half empty. But our petition is alive, even if on
life-support for now, and that is fantastic— especially if you were
in that gloomy Newton Marriot conference room on Tuesday night,
after we had counted all the signatures for a second time,
and still came out with the same total: 644 short!
But
first, there’s something extremely important that was utterly
misreported in today’s Boston Herald and I want this cleared up
immediately before any further confusion (and even damage!) is done. It was a story titled "Term limits question axed, tax cut may not
make ballot," by Carolyn Ryan and Maggie Mulvihill, they reported:
". . . [Jennifer] Peck said her group [CommFAST] hired organizers to
gather signatures, as did Citizens for Limited Taxation [&
Government] and proponents of a successful question to eliminate
turnpike tolls."
That
is a damnable lie and irresponsible journalism at its worst! We have
never hired paid petitioners or organizers. Ever. And both of
them should well have known it.
Carolyn Ryan called back today in response to Barbara’s and my
numerous calls to the Herald from its State House bureau all the way
up the feeding chain to publisher Patrick Purcell. Carolyn insisted
she’d gotten her information from the State House News Service. Barbara asked her to read it. She started, stopped, and muttered ".
. . oh, oh . . . ‘refuses to use paid petitioners . . ."
The
Boston Herald will publish an apology tomorrow (Friday) along with
Barbara’s letter to the editor.
But
back to my tale of clutching victory from the jaws of defeat!
On
election night 1994, in the Boston hotel room my Committee to Repeal
the Mandatory Seat Belt Law shared with CLT (which was fighting the
TEAM-sponsored Graduated Income Tax ballot questions) and LIMITS
(which had its second term limits proposal on the ballot), I watched
the returns as our repeal was falling to defeat. An AP reporter came
over and asked me if I was ready to concede the vote. I replied,
"Concede hell; I may be beaten, but I’ll never surrender."
That’s exactly how I again felt on Tuesday night—and we still had 19
hours of life remaining before the deadline with the Secretary of
State!
So we
scrambled, pulled out all the stops to find those 644-plus
signatures. I was positive we could find them—somehow; they were
there—somewhere!
As
soon as Barbara and I got back to my place, there were messages on
my answering machine to return. One was from Sue Dowd in Longmeadow
reporting that the clerk there had called to tell her that her
petition with 30 signatures had been certified; when was she coming
to pick it up? She asked me if our driver wasn’t going to pick it
up, as we’d told her it would be. The clerk had failed to give Sue’s
petition to our driver as instructed by our Letter of Authorization
carried by every driver!
The
next message was from Bill McKibben, offering to drive anywhere we
might need to send him the next day. Bill left Wednesday morning for
Longmeadow and returned with Sue’s 30 certified signatures.
We
called all our drivers and coordinators and asked them to call every
city and town hall in the state and ask, "Do you have any petitions
still your possession?" If yes, then "Do you have any letter ‘I’
petitions?" I put out our "ALERT!" to the thousand or so of you who
receive these Updates and asked that you to do the same. It wasn’t
long before the calls started coming in.
Anne
Hilbert, our Weymouth coordinator, found 196 certified signatures
"misplaced" and still in the Weymouth town clerk’s office and
retrieved them. Westminster admitted to still holding another 27
signatures (which were picked up by former state Rep. Bob Hawke and
relayed to Chip Faulkner, who hit the road from his Wrentham home
Wednesday morning and kept in touch with me by car-phone relaying
with others as I dug up more petitions). Rob Lamoureux, who provided
Chip with the phone [I’ve got it here, Rob!], our Burlington
coordinator, dug up another 37 from the Burlington town clerk,
picked them up (making him late for work!), and relayed them to
Faulkner.
57
good signatures were reported in New Bedford. A call to Ann Perry
sent her rushing to the city hall to claim them as a call came in
from the Cape reporting 28 signatures in Yarmouth. Norm Paley, our
Plymouth County coordinator, jumped in his Land Rover and raced
first to meet Ann Perry, then Harold Rusch, one of our Cape
coordinators, then back to Boston to get the 88 signatures to us
before the 5:00 PM deadline. I got a call from Helen Hatch of
Wakefield that she still had her certified petition with 12
signatures, which Barbara, Pat Warnock and I stopped by and picked
up on our way into Boston.
Governor Cellucci’s and Treasurer Malone’s campaigns, and Marc
DeCoursey of the Republican State Committee, called us and offered
to help, then began calling all the city and town clerks’ offices
too. Tom Valle of the Cellucci campaign provided us with two drivers
who raced out to Framingham and Lowell to grab a few more
"misplaced" petitions. (Three of Joe Malone’s guys came up to the
CLT&G office and helped us mule the boxes of petitions over to the
Secretary of State’s office as well, and Joe met us there when we
arrived for a brief congratulations.) By mid-afternoon many of the
clerks complained that they were going crazy with all the calls
coming in looking for "misplaced" letter "I" petitions!
When
the mail arrived, in it was our self-addressed stamped envelopes
from the clerks in the small towns in the western part of the state:
91 signatures from Belchertown, 47 from Pittsfield, a small handful
more from Russell, Southwick, Granville and Goshen.
When
Chip Faulkner got back into the office, he called the Secretary of
State’s Elections Division, asked, and discovered we had 161
certified signatures sitting there that people had mailed directly
to the Secretary!
Those
signatures put us at 115 certified signatures OVER the
requirement—miraculously *WE * HAD * MADE * IT!*
And
today, the Secretary of State’s Elections Division officially
announced that we have made it—by 117 signatures!
[In
today’s mail we received 31 more certified signatures in our
self-addressed stamped envelope from the Brimfield town clerk. They
arrived too late to be of any use.]
Miraculously—and with a lot of help way above and beyond the call of
duty!—our dedicated volunteers pulled this one off in the 11th hour
and fifty-five minutes!
But
this was only the first battle in what is now, unfortunately of
necessity, a drawn-out war. Today the Tax Equity Alliance of
Massachusetts (TEAM, aka "Tax Everything and More") and the
Massachusetts Teachers Association ("More is Never Enough")
announced their challenge of our signatures—hoping to do by
technicality what they know they can’t do through persuasion if we
get on the ballot: defeat the peoples’ initiative. I’m only
surprised that the League of Women Vultures didn’t also join in with
the usual suspects!
Oh
but for just a couple thousand more signatures and this could have
been avoided—but that was not to be, and we should be grateful we’re
still alive to fight the next battle. But this defense and our
likely counter-challenge, we expect, will cost us tens if not
hundreds of thousands of dollars which we do not have just for the
legal assistance and expenses. And it’s going to tie us up for
months when we could have been doing something more productive (like
anything). For us, the petition drive is far from over; we have just
survived the first gauntlet.
But,
assuming we can raise the funds for a respectable defense, it can
certainly be done, as it has many times before.
CLT survived signature
challenges in 1979-80 to both the Proposition 2½ initiative for a
law, and a Prop 2½ constitutional amendment, because we got so few
signatures on each that it was challengeable—which was when we
learned the hard way the risk of attempting to carry two petitions
at the same time, and why we NEVER have since.
The constitutional amendment, like
term limits in 1992, was killed by the Legislature in their
constitutional convention, so we had to settle for the statute,
which still stands because we are ever vigilant in its defense.
Opponents of rent control were challenged in 1993-94, and Denise
Jilson and her folks were still able to come up with sufficient
signatures to make it to the ballot—where rent control was repealed
by the voters. (The challenges and legal expenses cost them about
$200,000 and took flat-out work from December through May—just so
you are aware of and keep all these costs in perspective.)
The
Fair Ballot Access Committee fell just short of the required number
of signatures, challenged, and recovered enough signatures that city
and town clerks had disqualified to make it onto the 1990 ballot and
the voters adopted it. We have that law to thank for the 8½" x 14"
petitions we all just carried around instead of those god-awful
oversize petitions we used to have to cart about, and for now being
able to copy petitions; not allowed before this law was approved.
It
really is too bad that we couldn’t have picked up just another 2,000
signatures and made all of this unnecessary. But we didn’t. The
upside is, I’ll bet that in the future NOBODY will ever take it for
granted that "someone else will do it," or "why worry, they always
pull it off." Or bite off more than they can chew.
And
just think . . . every signature collected by those of you who took
an active role in this effort was one of the signatures that put us
over the top and gave us this incredible success!
Good
job, and thanks again for being an important part of this most
amazing resurrection in state petition drive history!
Chip Ford—
PS—From Barbara Anderson
I
should send this myself but I’m too exhausted to make the effort, so
I’m asking Chip to send it without changing a word.
Richard Friedman sent a message congratulating us and stating that
some people would have given in to despair on Tuesday night when
they were 644 down, instead of going out and finding enough missing
signatures the next day. I want you to know, I considered this. I
don’t think it even crossed Chip Ford’s mind.
And
now, reading about our premature death in this morning’s papers, I’m
mad as hell and almost as determined as he is that we will get to
that ballot if we have to crawl there over the bodies of the entire
Massachusetts Teachers Association. Thanks to everyone who helped,
and everyone who will.
Barbara—
Paul Craney and the MassFiscal team, and MassGOP's Wendy
Wakeman and her team of Republican activists, did an admirable job for first time
statewide petition drive organizers recruiting and
motivating volunteer petitioners
across the state, managing the demanding logistics required, and
provided a strong attempt to collect the required 80,239 certified
signatures for three separate petitions. I'd give them an "excellent" ranking if
sufficient signatures had been submitted
— I know their best efforts were
expended throughout the ordeal.
Wendy and I
spoke frequently so I could advise and encourage her when
she needed it the most — as only
someone who's been through that hell possibly can.
I told her to not worry about the accumulating numbers, they
won't be accurate anyway. Just keep running scared all
the way to the end, give it your all until it's over.
I'm always reminded of the line in the old Kenny Rogers
song,
The Gambler: "You never count your money, When
you're sitting at the table. There'll be time enough for
countin', When the dealing's done."
Ultimately Wendy told me the totals fell
short in the end:
Stop the
TCI Gas Tax: Approximately 48,000 certified signatures
(none submitted to the SoS)
Voter
ID: 56,694 certified signatures
Born
Alive: 75,259 certified signatures
All those
signatures were collected by volunteer petitioners. None of
them was paid a cent.
By
comparison, according to a State House News Service
report on December 1, of the three petitions that
submitted enough signatures to qualify to move ahead toward
the ballot:
• The Massachusetts
Package Store Association hired Signature Drive at a
rate of $5 to $8 per signature for its petition (which
would double the
number of alcohol licenses a single company could hold).
• The Committee on
Dental Insurance Quality (which would apply a profit
limit on dental insurance companies) paid more than
$500,000 on signature-gatherers.
• The Coalition for
Independent Work (Uber, Lyft, DoorDash) did not provide
details about the paid vendor it used, but spent more
than $200 million in California last year successfully
advocating for a similar measure known as Proposition
22.
More and more it
appears that petition drives that succeed today are sponsored by
either big business interests with deep pockets which hope to
personally profit — or big unions
(especially teachers and public employees) with deep pockets which
also hope to personally profit.
But there
have been other changes, a gradual evolution that has
increasingly hobbled citizen-initiated grassroots petition
drives.
In past
efforts the center of our successes was setting up tables in
dozens of malls around the state for a number of weekends,
where the signature traffic came to our tables to sign on.
The Wuhan Chinese Pandemic put an end to that practice until
it goes away, if it ever does.
The
abundance of local talk radio was always a major asset to
those grassroots efforts, but today that is a shadow of what
it once was. (Thank you Howie Carr, an exception that
mattered.)
Local
newspapers once reported on petition drive efforts in their
area, and the issues in detail. With acquisitions by
national newspaper conglomerates, belt-tightening to cut
costs, and reductions of local news staff most of their
readership is uninformed of the signature gathering in their
localities or the issues presented.
An overall
political apathy if not a sense of defeatism seems to
permeate the electorate more today than in the past.
Nonetheless
our efforts provided some comforting success.
Remember, it was the week when all petitions were delivered
to city registrars of voters and town clerks for signature
certification that the threat of the Transportation &
Climate Initiative imploded. TCI surprisingly
collapsed with the abrupt withdrawal of Connecticut,
Massachusetts and Rhode Island within days of each other
that week.
In a news
release sent out on December 2 by the Massachusetts GOP
"regarding ballot initiative projects" Chairman Jim Lyons
stated: “The outreach work that everybody put in will
serve us well in 2022 and beyond. Despite coming up
short during the tight signature collection timeframe, the
feedback we received on the ground was incredible, and you
can be certain that both of these causes will be taken up
again enthusiastically in the future." Let's hope the
opposition party to the ruling "progressive" Democrats can
build on that.
Lessons
Learned:
• First and foremost, I
continue to contend that only a single petition on one issue
should be presented by a volunteer petitioner.
Offering more than one issue to a potential signer on the
street dilutes the effort of all and encourages the
frustrating "No thanks, I'm all set" response.
The economy of
scale was certainly a benefit when delivering tens of
thousands of sheets for three separate petitions to city
registrars of voters and town clerks across the state's 351
cities and towns within its fourteen counties. It was
a benefit when volunteer "sweep" drivers were able to pick
up all petitions in the clerks' possession for each of the
three separate questions, instead of needing to send out
three different drivers for three separate pick-ups at each
city and town hall.
• Before deciding to
pursue the herculean months-long effort required for a
successful petition drive a muscular infrastructure needs to
first be in place and ready to hit the ground running.
If those mechanics and logistics are prepared, then
— and only then
— file the paperwork with the attorney
general's office to go forward.
I was gratified to
be able to provide my experience and advice from afar and to
participate by providing you and other CLT members with
petitions and instructions on petitioning as part of this
effort. I was also most grateful for not having the
responsibility and burden of executing even one of
the petition drives! Like all of us, I wish the
results had turned out better —
I hate not succeeding to reach the goal in these pursuits
more than anything (as you read
above).
Thank you for all
you did and however much you were able to assist. If
nothing else, the denizens in the State House atop Beacon
Hill know the natives are still down here, and are growing
more restless.
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Chip Ford
Executive Director |
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NOTE: In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. section 107, this
material is distributed without profit or payment to those who have expressed a prior
interest in receiving this information for non-profit research and educational purposes
only. For more information go to:
http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/17/107.shtml
Citizens for Limited Taxation ▪
PO Box 1147 ▪ Marblehead, MA 01945
▪ (781) 639-9709
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