Clean elections: Initiative challenge may have come up short

According to Willamette Week, the well-funded petition drive to put a recall of Portland's public financed City Hall elections on this spring's ballot appears to have come up short. The signature sheets turned in by the lavish-spending pro-downtown business First Things First Committee contained 40,998 signatures (only 26,691 valid signatures were needed to get the measure on the ballot), but initial sampling indicates that there were too many unregistered voters and duplicate signatures on the signature sheets to qualify. A successful appeal sounds unlikely.

Appreciative nod to Loaded Orygun and Jack Bog's Blog for catching this item. I sympathize with Jack's belief that a referendum is a better way to establish voter-owned elections than a split City Council vote, and at p3 we're also pleased to note his grudging inclination to vote for clean money, had it come to the ballot (it probably still will, just not this time). If City Hall candidates don't have to make themselves utterly beholden to developers before they can even seriously compete, it might--might! maybe!--reduce the number of rim-shot-worthy projects around town.

Loaded Orygun has an interview with the only candidate who's currently qualified under the clean election law.