Not So Super Tuesday

Inside Higher Ed
May 6, 2008

To listen to Ward Connerly last year, 2008 was going to be a crucial year in his fight against affirmative action. While the U.S. Supreme Court in 2003 upheld the legality of some forms of affirmative action in college admissions, the justices didn’t make it mandatory. And so Connerly set out to replicate the successes he had with state ballot measures in California, Washington State and Michigan. He identified five new target states and vowed to get affirmative action banned in each one, calling Election Day 2008 the Super Tuesday of his movement.
Connerly may have had reason to be confident. Once his proposed bans on affirmative action have made it onto ballots, they have never lost. And he managed to defeat affirmative action in states that are, on the red-blue continuum, very much blue. This year’s targets were a mix of red and purple.
So far this year, however, defenders of affirmative action are the ones winning. First last month in Oklahoma and then on Sunday in Missouri, proponents of affirmative action bans failed to submit enough signatures to get on the state ballots this fall by required deadlines. In one state, Colorado, the measure has qualified for the ballot and campaigns are still going on in Arizona and Nebraska. In both of those states — each with early July deadlines for submitting petitions — organizers said Monday that they would qualify, but they also acknowledged not yet being close. Nebraska’s push has only about 20 percent of the required signatures.
So what’s going on? Has the tide turned, as some defenders of affirmative action hope? Or has the movement against affirmative action simply run into administrative hurdles it didn’t count on and may not have been prepared to face in five states at once?
While both sides in the debate have their own analyses, one thing that they agree on is that defenders of affirmative action may have their greatest advantage before items reach the ballot. When the movement to use state referendums to ban affirmative action started, many educators hoped they would prevail to defend the practice in actual elections. That view is no longer much expressed — and even people who strongly believe in affirmative action are less likely these days to predict that the public will reject ballot proposals as written by Connerly.
But qualifying for state ballots is tricky, with requirements that vary from state to state. Defenders of affirmative action have made it clear that they will scrutinize as many signatures as possible and file suits if necessary to challenge signatures. As a result, proponents of the ballot measures have set goals much higher than the totals needed to qualify — as they expect some signatures to be successfully challenged. And legal maneuvering has also become effective.
Take Missouri, for example. Opponents of affirmative action said that they had more than 20,000 signatures on top of the required 150,000 or so that would be needed to place the measure on the ballot. But they said that they expected enough successful challenges that they didn’t want to submit the petitions with relatively little margin for error, as would have been the case at this late date. Instead, they will start again, hoping for 2010 elections.
Tim Asher, who led the Missouri effort for the ballot item, blamed the inability to collect enough signatures on Robin Carnahan, Missouri’s secretary of state, who rewrote the ballot language submitted by Asher and his allies. A state judge later rejected Carnahan’s language, but the petition drive didn’t begin until after that dispute had been resolved. Signatures could have been collected earlier, but only using Carnahan’s language, and the opponents of affirmative action didn’t want to start again if — as they predicted — they eventually won the language fight.
“We lost months in court that we could have used to get the petitions,” said Asher.
He predicted that the measure would be back and would win in 2010. Asher, formerly director of admissions at North Central Missouri College, said he was inspired to help the movement in part because he saw scholarships at the community college that favored some groups over others. “I was concerned over whether this is something I should be involved in,” he said.
But defenders of affirmative action see other lessons in the Missouri experience. “I believe that failing to obtain enough signatures to support the petition is a clear message from the citizens of Missouri,” said ReNee Dunman, director of equal opportunity and affirmative action at Old Dominion University and president of the American Association for Affirmative Action.
Dunman said that Missouri officials were correct to challenge the language proposed in the petition drive. She noted that by including phrases like “civil rights” in the names of the measures, opponents of affirmative action adopt language that has been used by advocates for minority students over the years. She also noted that Missouri’s secretary of state had been trying to draw attention to the reality that certain programs would be eliminated under the measure.
“It has always struck me as strange,” Dunman said, that critics of affirmative action like general statements on ballots rather than saying exactly what programs they would like to end. She said it was important for defenders of affirmative action to “fight for transparency” because “when people have all the information, they are supportive.”
Should the measure be on ballots in Arizona, Colorado and Nebraska, the debates could be different from those that played out in California and Michigan. In those two states, admission to the flagship public universities is extremely competitive and there was considerable focus on who was getting in and why. While admissions are competitive at places like the University of Colorado at Boulder, these institutions are not the same and some are quite different. Arizona State University, for example, expands enrollment to admit all qualified undergraduate applicants, so the image of rejected white applicants — an image successfully used in past campaigns against affirmative action — may be less powerful.
Where the impact is more apparent, however, may be in professional school admissions. Officials in all three states predicted that the immediate aftermath of a vote to end of affirmative action could be most visible there. [To read the entire story, go to: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2008/05/06/affirm ]