By Taxpayers Association of Oregon / OregonWatchdog.com
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The Senate bill to swap the gas tax vote from a November General election to a May election has hit a Constitutional wall. As a result the bill is stalled.
The petition itself on the front page in bold sets the election date.
Politicians cannot just move the election date — if they could, they then could conceivably move it to 10 years in the future.
Our legal commentators shared this analysis:
“In 1902 the voters of Oregon voted the referendum into our Constitution by an 11 to 1 margin. They gave the legislature an explicit message: When you try to legislate for a particular interest, or you exercise partisan power like a machine, we the people will step in front of you with a referendum. Move aside. We will vote, as we determine, whether or not that bill will become law.That is what the words in the Oregon Constitution mean. The 250,000+ signers of the petition in Referendum 302 explicitly set the date of the vote for November 3, 2026. The legislature no longer has authority to tamper with that date, or with any other part of the referendum. Plain and simple, the process — all of it — belongs to the people of Oregon.”
There are other constitutional issues such as the rushed May election blocking citizens from having enough time to submit and challenge ballot title changes, and also for citizens to submit their Voter Pamphlet arguments by utilizing the petition gathering method. Rushing all of this with mere weeks before the State mails out early ballots to military overseas is not feasible.
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