Where do we stand today? The Attorney General has approved our initiative and the Secretary of State has given us the official petition form.  We are now ready to recruit 100,000 Massachusetts registered voters.

Why not put the petition online and let people download and print it? Massachusetts courts have imposed very strict rules that the petition form that a voter signs must be an exact copy of official form that the Secretary of State provides. (Remember what we said about the rules being designed by insiders to keep questions off the ballot?) There have been cases where Massachusetts courts disqualified a petition drive that submitted enough signatures because the signature sheets were not identical to the official form or had stray marks in the margins where signers made small scribbles to get the pen started on a cold day. (Yes, this really happened!) Out of an overabundance of caution we decided it’s less risky to mail signers a petition form that we print ourselves so we guarantee that is identical to the official form than have signers print a form that is not an exact legal copy. (There is literally an official state regulation called “the exact copy rule.”) The campaign has a bulk postal rate, so we can mail out the petition form and pay for it to be mailed back with a signature for not much more than price of the first class stamp that signers who print the petition themselves would need. Also, this way we can print the signer’s name and address on the petition so once it’s actually signed, it’s easy for the city and town election officials to look up and verify that the signer is registered to vote. (One of the most common reasons for a signature to be rejected is that the city or town election official can’t make out the signer’s handwriting to look them up.)

Why are there two signature drives? The Massachusetts Constitution requires a two stage process. In December 2021 our certified signatures will be delivered to the Legislature. At that time the House and Senate will have the option of passing the proposal as written. If the Legislature does not pass our proposed law, we need to collect the second round of signatures and turn them no later than July 6, 2022 for the initiative to be placed on the ballot.

Why do we need 100,000 signatures? The minimum number of signature that we need to submit is 80,239 this year and another 13,374 next year, for a total of 93,613. We are adding in a few thousand signatures for each submission and rounding up to 100,000 signatures to have a cushion. But since all the people we mail petitions will be pre-qualified registered voters with their information pre-printed on the petition for easy verification by election officials, we expect very few of our signatures to be rejected. And our cost to acquire a signature, which the signer will pay, is only $3. By way of comparison, in a conventional boots on the ground signature drive where we expect 30% of the signatures to be disqualified, because some signatures are illegible or the voter moved and the address is not correct or people are simply not registered and won’t admit that to the petitioner, we’d need a minimum of 150,000 signatures, and the cost to collecting each of those signatures is typically twice as much as our postal process. That’s why a conventional signature drive is out of reach for most activist groups unless they have very wealthy backers.

Do we have to wait for the election? No! We can lobby for our initiative until July 6, 2022 to try to persuade the legislature to pass it themselves before it goes on the ballot. The ballot initiative gives us leverage to pressure the legislature to pass this and other proposals, particularly once we have the signatures and the legislators see that we have the power to put it on the ballot.