Missouri’s initiative-petition drives on pace to set record
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St. Louis Beacon: More than a year away from the 2010 election, Missouri election officials already are predicting that a record number of initiative petition drives will take to the streets to get numerous proposals -- from stem-cell research and term limits to eminent domain rights -- on the ballot. So far, 22 such petitions have been approved by the Secretary of State's office for circulation. That includes seven that received the OK late last week. Spokeswoman Laura Egerdal said the office expects more to follow, with the final total likely to exceed last year's record-setting tally of 25 initiative petitions. "In the last election cycle, we did not see this many petitions this early," Egerdal said. But a record-setting pace on petitions doesn't necessarily mean a mass of measures on the ballot. In 2006 and again in 2008, five statewide issue proposals were on each ballot. Three each time had been placed via the initiative petition process, where supporters collect tens of thousands of signatures from registered voters; generally, 80,000-120,000 are necessary to get a proposal on the ballot. (The remaining two statewide ballot issues in 2008 and 2006 had been placed by the Legislature, which doesn't need signatures -- just a majority vote.)
There's no deadline for submitting initiative-petition requests to the Secretary of State's office, but there is a deadline -- May 2 -- for turning in the necessary signatures to get the proposed measure on the November 2010 ballot. So far, 61 requests have to been filed this year with the Secretary of State's office to circulate initiate petitions, but 27 were rejected on technical grounds and 10 were withdrawn, Egerdal said. A handful are still in the process of obtaining approval or rejection. Of the 22 approved for circulation, several deal with the same issue. Three, for example, use various wording to call on voters to, in effect, overturn their 2006 approval of Amendment 2, which protects all forms of stem-cell research allowed under federal law, including embryonic stem-cell research.
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