The architecture of political power

By Jason Hancock | Editor-in-Chief

Good morning, and welcome to The Weekender.

Two years ago, an Oklahoma technology vendor made a brief appearance in Missouri’s long-running Dean Plocher drama.

The then-speaker of the Missouri House arranged a series of meetings in the Capitol between his fellow Republican lawmakers and Western Petition Systems, an Oklahoma company hired there to help verify signatures for citizen-led ballot initiatives.

At the time, it looked like one more odd episode in an already strange scandal. Plocher was under an ethics investigation, in part for pushing the House to buy a separate constituent-management system over the objections of nonpartisan staff. So when he started arranging meetings for another out-of-state vendor, lawmakers in both parties wondered why he was anywhere near it.

The idea went nowhere. The secretary of state's office said it already had a system for verifying signatures. A Republican elections chair called the price tag a nonstarter. Others raised the obvious concern about handing voter data to a private company.

So Missouri did not follow Oklahoma down that road. And now, Oklahoma is showing where it leads.

Earlier this month, four Oklahoma voters asked their state Supreme Court to overturn the rejection of State Question 836, a measure that would have opened the state’s primary elections. They had collected more than 209,000 signatures, well past the roughly 173,000 required. The secretary of state certified 142,567. Nearly 58,000 were thrown out because they failed to match four of five data points in the voter file: first name, last name, ZIP code, house number, birth month and day.

The voters argue the state has reported only aggregate totals, without identifying which signatures were rejected or which data points failed: “57,841 citizens did not lie,” their challenge reads. Oral arguments are set for July 7.

None of that proves the verification system killed the measure. Ballot campaigns fail for plenty of reasons. But it shows what a rule built to protect a process can also do to it.

And the lesson for Missouri is not that Plocher nearly handed an Oklahoma vendor the keys to the initiative petition system. He didn't. The lesson is that the most consequential fights over direct democracy often happen in places that sound technical and procedural. 

That’s exactly why they're worth watching.

Who verifies the signatures? What counts as a match? How long can certification take? Who writes the ballot summary, and what happens if a court finds it misleading? How many geographic hurdles can lawmakers put between voters and a constitutional amendment?

Those questions rarely draw the attention that abortion, marijuana, Medicaid or taxes command once they reach the ballot. But before voters can decide any of that, someone else decides whether they even get to decide at all.

Missouri has fighting that battle for years, with lawsuits over ballot summaries and a vote in August on a constitutional amendment that would require citizen-led constitutional amendments to win not just statewide but in all eight congressional districts.

That is not the same as privatizing signature verification. But it belongs to the same argument. 

Supporters call these changes safeguards. Opponents call them a way to weaken majority rule. Either way, they are not side issues. They are the architecture of political power.

Missouri did not hire Western Petition Systems. The Plocher meetings produced no contract and no law. In that narrow sense, we avoided our neighboring state’s path.

But it has not avoided the larger fight over how many gates lawmakers and election officials can build before voters ever reach a ballot. 

As it turns out, direct democracy is most vulnerable in the fine print, where a deadline or a mismatched data point can quietly decide whether the public gets a say at all.

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