A PROMISE TO KEEP: 5%
A Ballot Committee of
Citizens for Limited Taxation & Government
PO Box 408 * Peabody, MA 01960
Phone:(617) 248-0022 /(508) 538-3900 E-Mail: cltg@cltg.org
Visit our web-page at: http://cltg.org
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*** Promise Update ***
Friday, January 2, 1998
NEWS RELEASE
January 2, 1998
Contact Chip Ford (978-538-3900)
Re: Teachers’ Union Challenge of Promise Initiative Petition signatures
Teachers show fear of electorate with attempt to keep Promise petition off ballot; Teachers attack
voters’ effort to make pols keep promise on "temporary" tax hike
In a dazzling display of distrust for Massachusetts’ voters ability to make informed decisions on tax
issues, the organization whose members are charged with educating these voters, the
Massachusetts Teachers Association, has challenged signatures obtained by A Promise to Keep:
5% on its petition to roll back the "temporary" income tax rate of 5.95 percent to its promised 5
percent.
Promise, a ballot committee of Citizens for Limited Taxation & Government, collected sufficient signatures during the fall petition drive to launch its petition toward the 1998 statewide ballot. The Secretary of State’s Elections Division certified more than the constitutionally-mandated 64,928 signatures and is now required to submit the certified petition next week to the Legislature for a hearing. The legislature must vote on the petition by the first Wednesday in May; if it votes "No," or ignores the required vote, Promise will collect an additional 10,821 certified signatures and the initiative petition will go on the ballot.
The MTA, predictably opposed to any tax relief for parents of "the children" as they try to save for college and perhaps buy a home computer "for the children," is struggling to prevent the income tax rollback from ever reaching the voters whom the MTA has educated! We are shocked by this lack of confidence in its own ability to make its case for higher taxes and broken promises during a fair ballot campaign next fall.
Promise is confident that its signatures will be upheld by the state ballot law commission. As a precaution, Promise staff and volunteers have been working through the holidays with copies of the petition to identify more signatures that *should have been* certified by local registrars but were not.
This is a slow, tedious process and we have only made a dent in the project, but already we have found hundreds of registrar errors that have disqualified and disenfranchised legitimate voters.
Registrars are required to mark "S" (can’t read signature), "N" (not registered at this address), "W" (signed petition for wrong community) or "T" (signed petition twice) if they do not certify a name. They then count the number of certified signatures and note them on the bottom of the petition, from where they are totaled by the Secretary of State. For starters, we have found registrars who counted wrong (eg. wrote 8 instead of 28). Then, using the statewide CVR database provided by the Secretary of State, we have begun to identify voters who were marked "T" but in fact only signed once, marked "S" where the voter’s signature can be easily identified, and marked "N" where the voter is clearly registered. We have also found numerous data entry problems with the database itself that, once corrected, will certify many more voters who live at incorrectly-entered addresses.
Based on its preliminary examination of the registrars’ work, Promise expects to find more signatures than we could possibly lose in the teachers’ challenge, and to proceed to the 1998 ballot.
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From today’s State House News Service report:
[ . . . ]
ADVANCES......2.....SHNS.....JAN. 5, 1998
BALLOT QUESTIONS....The Massachusetts Teachers Association has filed its expected
challenge to a ballot petition rolling the state income tax back to 5 percent from 5.95. Along with the
MTA, the Tax Equity Alliance of Massachusetts has scrutinized "more petitions that any man,
woman or child should ever have to," in the words of one staffer. As of Wednesday, TEAM officials
said they had found several dozen ineligible signatures on the tax rollback petitions, which may be
enough to bar the measure from the 1998 ballot. The rollback initiative, led by Citizens for Limited
Taxation and Government, filed only 81 more signatures than the mandatory 64,928 to qualify. But
Barbara Anderson and Chip Ford, who are running the CLT&G campaign, aren’t worried - their
volunteers have found several hundred additional signatures that appear to have been improperly
disqualified by local town clerks. And that’s just in a handful of towns, mostly on Cape Cod.. As far
as Anderson is concerned, the CLT&G petition will go on the ballot, despite what she called "an
extraordinary level of dumb decisions by town clerks in three Cape communities." "We believe in
the ballot process," Anderson said. "(But the MTA and TEAM) don’t like these things on the
ballot. I would think that if the MTA had confidence in the people they educated... they could trust
the voters." Ford added that he’s "not a bit concerned" about the challenge, because he has been
cross-checking the petitions with the state’s voter-registration database. "It’s a lot easier to find
signatures that are eligible" than disqualify them, Ford said. "I just regret we have to go through
another one of these stupid challenges." The state Ballot Law Commission is expected to hold its
first meeting on Jan 12, when it will begin reviewing the MTA/TEAM challenges of the rollback
petition signatures. The Legislature must also schedule a hearing on the petition initiative this
spring, and if it fails to act, sponsors must collect an additional 10,821 signatures to qualify for the
ballot. The Ballot Law Commission got a new chairman on Wednesday, as retired judge Robert
Hallisey was sworn in as head of the 5-member board. By law, the commission must have two
Republicans and two Democrats, and acting Gov. Paul Cellucci is expected to announce the second
Democratic member this week. Cellucci originally appointed John Fenton, dean of the Suffolk Law
School, to the chairmanship. But Fenton, after considering his existing obligations, turned the
appointment down.
[ . . . ]
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You can e-mail A Promise to Keep: 5% at --> cltg@cltg.org
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