Wednesday

I realize that I normally do not use this blog to trumpet what I do for work but I felt like I had to share this and this seemed to be the easiest way for me to do so.

This is from an article on Oregon live that I have linked in the title

"Attorney Ross Day, the executive director of Common Sense, also runs the petitioning outfit set up by the group. And he proudly noted that their measure - which would establish a non-partisan process for redrawing legislative district lines - had a high validity rate of 80 percent.

That's the highest rate of any initiative so far this year - and one of the highest in the last 12 years. My colleague, Kim Melton, compiled the validity rates stretching back to 1998 and found that it is well above the average rate of 73 percent. And it's a better validity rate than many initiatives from back before tougher petitioning laws were approved by the Legislature in 2007 and 2009."

The section that I put in bold is the key 80% validity!! This is huge and something as the article said that hasn't been done in the last twelve years. I wanted to post this because this is what I have been doing for the last year.

Now, for myself, all politics aside in the case of citizen initiatives, I do not care if it is a liberal or conservative issue. I care if Oregon voters get to have a choice or a vote on the issue. Now, it is true that I may not agree with the end result of the choice or I may not agree with where all of the funding is coming from for some of the issues that are moving around the state. But I think one of the things that makes Oregon a special state is the fact that we have this process. It, I think, makes us a better state then most of the states in the country.

But, what I am most excited about is the fact that we at Vote Oregon have been working to make sure that we run a clean system. There is a reason why our validity rate is the highest in the state. The biggest reason is my friend Travis and how important it is to him that we are a company that has integrity. He pushes this to the employees and they know that this is important. I believe that we could have gotten more total signatures had we wanted to cut corners like some other companies. But in the end that would not have benefited anyone and would have been, in my opinion, immoral. That is one of the things that I like most about doing this kind of work. I feel like I like it even more because in the past integrity was not a word that you heard with the petition process. I honestly feel like given time we can change how people think about the process and we can make it be the tool that it supposed to be and we can help people forget about the dark years when special interests and fraud seemed to dominate the process.

That isn't to say that everyone in the business runs as clean as we do because they do not. There is a reason why other firms had such low validity rates and did not qualify. I am totally confident that if someone wants an issue on the ballot in Oregon and they come to us with enough time and money we can get in on the ballot and we can do it clean and correctly with a high, high validity rate. This has been proven by the last few campaigns I have been involved in. I am hoping this will continue.