Kansascity.com
By CHRIS BLANK
The Associated Press
JEFFERSON CITY
May 4, 2008
A group seeking to bar many state affirmative action programs missed a Sunday deadline to submit its initiative petition.
Missouri had been one of five states California businessman Ward Connerly and his supporters had targeted for an effort to strike down affirmative action laws.
The Missouri effort for a constitutional amendment was led by Tim Asher, a former admissions director at North Central Missouri College in Trenton. Asher said it became obvious on Saturday that there were not enough signatures to qualify the proposed constitutional amendment for the ballot, and he pledged to try again in 2010.
Asher estimated supporters gathered 170,000 signatures — which is enough to make the ballot. But he said it wasn’t high enough because many signatures are later disqualified.
It takes between 86,000 and 95,000 signatures for a petition that creates a new law, and from 140,000 to 150,000 for those that change the state constitution.
Connerly predicted Sunday that supporters would have collected enough signatures if they had another two weeks.
“This is a marathon and not a sprint, and it’s far from over,” Connerly said. “There is a lot of support in the state of Missouri.”
Supporters from four groups angling to get their initiative petitions on the November ballot did hit the Sunday deadline. They wheeled in dollies stacked with boxes that were filled with petitions and tens of thousands of signatures.
As many as six groups had been expected to submit petitions, but only four had done so by the deadline.
Arriving within 15 minutes of each other Sunday were groups pushing petitions to change the state constitution to restrict the use of eminent domain and to require the use of more renewable energy.
Earlier in the week, petitions to allow home health-care providers to unionize and to repeal the state’s cap on gambling losses while barring the construction of new casinos were submitted.
The affirmative action petition had been among the most controversial, triggering lawsuits from Asher and critics challenging the fairness of a ballot summary authored by the secretary of state’s office. A state judge later rewrote the passage that would have appeared before voters at the polls.
Asher and Connerly attributed the difficulty in collecting signatures to the court battle. They both called for changes in how initiative petitions are handled in Missouri.
“We effectively lost our right to bring to the voters of Missouri whether they felt race-preference policies were positive to the state or something that needed to be eliminated,” Asher said.
Connerly said cold, rainy weather and “blockers” who trailed signature-gatherers also made it difficult to get enough Missourians to sign.
A spokesman for Secretary of State Robin Carnahan said the office stands behind the ballot summary it wrote. Spokesman Ryan Hobart said Asher had as much opportunity as everyone else to submit his petition by Sunday’s deadline.
WeCAN, a coalition of community, religious, labor, business and education leaders that was created to oppose the affirmative action petition, said not filing any petition was the best outcome.
The Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now’s chief organizer in Missouri, Jeff Ordower, said the inability to get enough signatures also was “a movement for equality” in Missouri.
“We thought it would be close,” Ordower said. “We thought they would submit and not have enough of a margin. We didn’t imagine they wouldn’t submit at all.” [To see the entire article, go to: http://www.kansascity.com/115/story/605671.html ]
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