Activists working to impose a California-style election system in Oklahoma, which routinely limits voters’ choices to two members of the same political party, have filed lawsuits seeking to overturn newly enacted initiative-petition reforms.

Senate Bill 1027, by state Sen. David Bullard and House Speaker Kyle Hilbert, made several transparency reforms to Oklahoma’s initiative-petition process.

Among other things, the new law requires initiative-petition campaigns to publicly reveal their source of funding and provide voters with information on any associated financial impact created by a proposal, such as if its passage could force tax increases or funding cuts to other parts of state government.

The new law also requires that initiative-petition efforts collect signatures equal to no more than 11.5 percent of the votes cast in any county during the most recent statewide general election (when seeking to change state law), or 20.8 percent (when seeking to amend the Oklahoma Constitution, which requires more signatures to advance to the ballot).

That change would require petitions to reach out to voters in at least 20 Oklahoma counties out of the 77 statewide. In contrast, under the system in place prior to SB 1027’s enactment, some petitions collected more than two-thirds of signatures from only two counties and largely ignored voters throughout most of the state.

Officials with Oklahoma United, a group seeking to have Oklahoma’s election system changed to largely mirror California elections, where voters’ November choices are often limited to two Democrats and no Republicans, have filed a lawsuit in response.

One lawsuit challenging SB 1027—filed by Ken Setter of Tulsa and Tony Stobbe of Edmond—asks the Court to declare the retroactivity clause of SB 1027 unconstitutional.

A second lawsuit, filed by Setter, Stobbe, Steven Craig McVay, and Amy Cerato, an anti-turnpike activist, asks the Oklahoma Supreme Court to strike down the provisions of the new law requiring ballot measures to be described in plain language understood by all, provisions requiring transparent public reporting of funding sources for a petition, and the requirement for signatures to be collected from a larger swath of Oklahoma.

The petitioners also claim the law is an unconstitutional “special law” because it deals only with the initiative-petition process.

The activists’ lawsuit claims the law’s provision requiring signature collection from a larger swath of Oklahoma violates Article V, Section 2 of the Oklahoma Constitution. However, that section of the constitution only requires that petitions collect signatures equal to 8 percent (to change state law) and 15 percent (to change the Oklahoma Constitution) of the votes cast in the last general election to place a measure on the ballot. Article V, Section 2 contains no language forbidding regulations that require those signatures to be gathered from across the state rather than in only a handful of locations.

In a release, McVay claimed SB 1027’s requirement to collect signatures from across Oklahoma “treats rural voters like me as second-class citizens,” even though rural citizens may be almost entirely ignored under the old system he seeks to restore.

Officials with Oklahoma United view the new law as a threat to their proposed State Question 836.

Under Oklahoma United’s proposed State Question 836, all candidates—Democrats, Republicans, and independents—would be placed on a single primary ballot and the two candidates receiving the most votes would then be placed on the general-election ballot.

That largely mirrors California’s election system, which routinely limits voters’ general-election choices to two candidates from the same political party.

In 2022, voters in California’s Fifteenth, Sixteenth, Twenty-Ninth, Thirtieth, Thirty-Fourth, and Thirty-Seventh  Congressional Districts had a choice of only two Democratic candidates when they went to the polls in November. The same thing occurred in five state Senate races and 13 state assembly races that year.

Had SQ 836 been in place in Oklahoma in 2018, Oklahoma voters would have been forced to choose between two Democrats for governor, even though far more voters cast ballots for Republican candidates in that year’s summer primaries.

In Oklahoma’s 2018 governor’s race, there were 10 candidates who filed to run as Republicans and two who filed to run as Democrats. In the June 2018 primary, 452,606 Oklahomans cast a vote for a Republican gubernatorial candidate compared to 395,494 who cast votes for a Democrat.

But under SQ 835, the November ballot that year would have pitted Democrat Drew Edmondson against Democrat Connie Johnson with no Republican option provided. Because the Republican vote was split 10 ways in the primary, no GOP candidate received more votes than the second-place finisher in the Democratic primary.