petition circulator – ThisIsCommonSense.org

Should people caught lying go to jail? Vindictive spouses would have a field day with that one, wouldn’t they?

Lying is objectionable, of course. But only certain kinds of lies — perjury, or lies used to steal from someone — should be punished by force of law.

Some people, however, are forever seeking new ways to harass other people. Especially, it seems, when it comes to perfectly legal activities that these busybodies happen to dislike. For example, petitioning to post a question on an election ballot. A process already suffering a multitude of burdensome restrictions in many states.

Arizona has just passed a law to penalize petition circulators who deliberately misrepresent the content of a petition they’re passing around. Anyone who does lie about a petition is behaving badly. But how can this law be enforced without sending intimidating “truth squads” to follow petitioners around, making their job even tougher? And how does one distinguish between “lies” and the often very sharply different understanding of issues that we always observe in political debate?

What a country this would become if all political “lies” could be punished by six months in jail. All politics would have to take place in a courtroom. And sadly, it’s not only the liars who would be rounded up. It would be those causing the most trouble for those with the most power.

There is, of course, a very easy way to be sure what a petition says. Read it.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.

A leading indicator of a free nation? The lack of political prisoners. We Americans are aghast when we learn of dissenters jailed in other countries.

But, even in America, politicians in various states seek to put people in jail for engaging in legitimate (if dissenting) political activism.

I am one of their targets.

You may have heard that two other citizen activists and I are under the gun in Oklahoma. Allegedly, we defied the state’s residency requirements for people who circulate petitions.

The charge is false, as I explain at FreePaulJacob.com. But our glaring innocence didn’t prevent Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson from indicting us for supposedly defrauding the state.

Moreover, the Oklahoma law, imposed to thwart rather than foster the initiative process, is unconstitutional. The U.S. Supreme Court has said as much regarding similar restrictions elsewhere.

And recently, in Ohio, a federal district court granted preliminary relief to plaintiffs who wanted to use out-of-state circulators, which Ohio legislators had outlawed.

The court endorsed the U.S. Supreme Court’s conclusion that since the demand that circulators be registered voters “decreas[es] the pool of potential circulators, the requirement imposed an unjustified burden on political expression. . . .”

That’s right. America still doesn’t jail dissenters who work peaceably to put issues on the ballot and people up for office.

This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.