Executive Report

Courts to rule on 'Cutback'

THE FATE of the "Cutback Amendment" is now up to the courts. The proposed amendment would "reduce the size of the Illinois House from 177 to 118 members" and would "provide for the election of one representative from each of 118 districts" - thus abolishing cumulative voting. The State Board of Elections ruled July 30 that the proposition should not be on the ballot. To get on the November ballot, the Cutback Amendment needed 252,008 valid signatures. The board said that only 100,883 signatures met the requirements of anew state law which requires that all petition signers be from the same election jurisdiction as the person who circulated the petition and the person who notarized it. The board also ruled that the proposition deals with more than one subject — a violation of the "free and equal" elections clause of the 1970 Constitution (Article III, section 3). On both issues, the board's vote was split 5-3.

Emphasizing that the election board's job is to administer the law and not to change it, the board majority (four Democrats and one Republican) based its decision on a strict interpretation of P.A. 81-163. The law says that if one signature on a petition sheet is invalid, the whole sheet (25 signatures) must be thrown out. A more liberal interpretation of the law would delete only the invalid signatures from a petition. Under this interpretation the Cutback proposition would have had some 321,000 valid signatures — more than enough to be on the ballot.

The Coalition for Political Honesty (CPH) filed an appeal of the board's decision August 6 in both Sangamon County Circuit Court and the Illinois Supreme Court. At issue will be the board's application of the election law and possibly the validity of the law itself.

One problem is that the law became effective in August 1979 when the petition drive for the Cutback Amendment was already underway. Opponents of the amendment say there was plenty of time for petition drive organizers to conform to the law, but they chose not to. Proponents say that applying the new law to the Cutback proposition violates the 1970 Constitution. Article IV, section 3 allows 18 months to gather the signatures on petitions for an initiative to propose an amendment to the Legislative Article of the state Constitution.

Another question is whether strict interpretation of the law imposes a penalty for invalid signatures and prohibits reasonable access to the ballot. P.A. 81-163 was passed in the wake of allegations of fraud in petitions for the "Thompson Proposition" (see Illinois Issues, September 1978). The law's purpose is to make it easier to check petition signatures against voter registration records. But proponents of the Cutback Amendment say the law was used to make it harder to put the proposition on the ballot.

The 1970 Constitution limits the power of initiative to proposing amendments to the Legislative Article on structural and procedural subjects (Art. XIV, sec. 3). This is the second time the courts have been asked to rule on the constitutional initiative for the Legislative Article. In 1976, the Illinois Supreme Court threw out petitions signed by 650,000 people in a drive sponsored by the CPH to put three "political honesty" amendments on the ballot. The court ruled against the propositions on the very narrow grounds that they did not deal with both structural and procedural changes to the Legislative Article.

According to debates at the Constitutional Convention, "It was the Legislative Committee report that the size of the House be modestly reduced. This was dropped on the way because of the very difficult subject we had on single-member districts and cumulative voting. It may very well be that some day the people will want to accomplish that revision."

September 1980/Illinois Issues/29