Affirmative action ban initiative headed toward ballot

August 22, 2008
BY MATTHEW HANSEN
WORLD-HERALD STAFF WRITER

A campaign to ban most forms of affirmative action in Nebraska has enough petition signatures to reach the November ballot.Doug Tietz, director of the Nebraska Civil Rights Initiative, the group advocating the ban, said this morning that the Nebraska Secretary of State's office had informed him that the petition had "more than enough" valid signatures after a county-by-county check of those signatures.The initiative needed 112,152 valid signatures – equal to 10 percent of registered voters statewide – to be placed on the ballot. Signers must be registered Nebraska voters.John Gale, Nebraska Secretary of State, announced the official number of valid signatures this afternoon. With all 93 counties completing the verification process, the initiative had 136,589 valid signatures of registered voters."We have it by a comfortable margin," Tietz said this morning. "Nebraskans signed it, and now they want to vote on it, period."The Nebraska Civil Rights Initiative is seeking to change the state constitution to bar public agencies such as city governments and the University of Nebraska from considering applicants' race or gender when enrolling students or hiring workers. Those practices are commonly known as affirmative action.Nebraskans United, the group opposing the affirmative action ban, has alleged misconduct by the petition gatherers as they collected signatures through the spring and summer. [To see the entire story, go to: http://www.omaha.com/index.php?u_page=2835&u_sid=10413224 ]