When is 5.33% a round number?

When you need a rationale for an otherwise baseless decision, anything resembling some sort of logic will do.

In his Iowa City Beacon post calling for voting ‘No’ on Public Measure C, a former Iowa City Council member and mayor John Balmer says:

The Charter Review Commission looked at the minimum number of signatures required back in 1975, and found that it was 5.33 percent of the city’s population. They applied that same ratio to today’s population, and arrived at the current minimum of 3,600.

What Mr. Balmer fails to explain is why the 2014–2015 Charter Review Commission decided to base their increase of minimum required signatures for initiative & referendum petitions on city population, even though the original requirement was based on voter turnout.

To clarify what we are talking about, when a statute is formulated along the lines of “the petition is valid if signed by eligible electors equal in number to N percent of the persons who voted at the last election, but not less than M persons”, M is normally just an N percent of the average voter turnout at the time the statute was written. It’s the case with every citizen petition statute, state or municipal, that we know of — and we’ve done pretty extensive research on the subject — and it was definitely the case with Iowa City back in 1975 when the Iowa City Home Rule Charter was written.

The average number of active voters in Iowa City in the 70s fluctuated around 10,000, thus the original Charter language (emphasis ours):

… petitions must be signed by qualified electors equal in number to at least twenty-five percent of the number of persons who voted in the last regular city election, but such signatures shall be no fewer than two thousand five hundred qualified electors.

Spelling it out for Mr. Balmer, 25% of 10,000 = 2,500.

It‘s common sense, really. However, since 1975 the average Iowa City voter turnout has remained nearly stagnant at 10,000:

That’s right, while our population has increased from 46,500 to nearly 70,000, average voter turnout in city elections has barely changed :/.

This posed a problem for the members of the Charter Review Commission who refused to remove the “qualified” elector requirement unless the minimum number of signatures was raised to “compensate” for that change.

Public pressure to remove the “qualified” elector requirement was substantial though, so the Commission members racked their brains trying to come up with a new minimum that was “based on something” other than the standard average voter turnout. Finally, one member suggested population growth, to which another responded with a sense of relief: “Oh, yeah, I was just going to throw darts!”, and that was that.

In complete absence of a precedent, despite the fact that a percentage of the population is not even old enough to vote, the commission’s majority decided to use Iowa City’s population growth as a pre-text for “re-setting” the minimum number of required signatures because it allowed them to rationalize and execute their anti-democratic agenda.

This is how the 5.33% that Mr. Balmer is referring to came to exist.

Answering the question of whether Mr. Balmer was writing about something he didn’t fully understand or whether he was purposefully trying to give an air of authority to one of the most absurd municipal code decisions in recent Iowa City history is left as an exercise for the reader.

In practice, thus rationalized 3,600 minimum number of signatures translates into about 40% of the current voter turnout in Iowa City.

In other words, petitioners need to collect signatures of almost half of the voting electorate in advance before the said electorate gets to “officially” weigh in on an issue. That’s voter suppression, plain and simple, and that’s why we are so passionate about this issue.

It’s worth noting that a lot of initiative and referendum statutes across the country simply do not specify a fixed minimum number of signatures, and require just the percentage. It’s also worth noting that in the overwhelming majority of initiative and referendum statutes across the country that requirement is exactly 10 percent of the people who voted in the last election — the same percentage that’s codified in the Iowa Code Section 362.4 and that’s being proposed by Public Measure C.

Looking for more info? Check out Fixing the City Charter, The Sky Has Already Fallen, Mr. Balmer and Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt