By Ron McWhirter

We dodged the bullet with the failure of State Question 836 to reach the Oklahoma ballot. The proposal would have dramatically changed the way elections are conducted in Oklahoma. It would have replaced the current “closed primary” system – where only the members of a political party can vote to select the nominees for their party to appear on the General Election ballot for all voters. Instead, under the so-called “open primary” proposal, which is more correctly called a “jungle primary,” there would be a single “top-two” primary election.

All candidates – regardless of party – would appear on the same ballot and all voters – regardless of party – could vote for any of the candidates. The two candidates receiving the most votes, regardless of their party registration, would advance to the General Election. Those two candidates might be of the same party, and candidates of minor parties and independent candidates would likely be eliminated in the open primary and never make it to the November General Election.

On March 3, the office of the Secretary of State (SOS) announced that only 142,567 signatures were verified to be valid – over 30,000 less than the number required. Currently in Oklahoma, 172,993 valid signatures are required for initiatives such as SQ 836 that would make a constitutional change. The SOS filed the required signature verification report with the Oklahoma Supreme Court on March 5, 2026 and any challenges relating to the validity of the signatures verified must be submitted by June 15, 2026. The proponents indicated they would evaluate if all lawful signatures were included in the count and decide if they would submit a challenge.

RINOs (Republicans In Name Only) and Democrat leaders lamented the failure of the state question. They supported the change as a way to disenfranchise conservatives, and advance their liberal positions.

One RINO – Oklahoma City Mayor David Holt – played a major role in supporting the initiative. He expressed disappointment and the hope that Oklahomans one day will demand for the current system to be changed. He said in a Facebook post, “In the meantime, it will sadden us to see statewide candidates continue to focus on strange issues and take extreme positions ...” Before being elected mayor, Holt served as a Republican member of the Oklahoma Senate. During his time in the Oklahoma Legislature, he was among the most liberal Republicans, scoring just 54% on our Oklahoma Conservative Index.

Former state Sen. A.J. Griffin (R-Guthrie) also was active in the campaign for SQ 836 and tried to put the best face on the loss. She said in a statement, “I view this citizen petition as a great success already: opening the eyes of many thousands of voters about how our election system has brought us disappointing results, and why we have to change ...” Senator Griffin – who sadly had been my senator – scored just 52% on the Oklahoma Conservative Index.

The RINOs, such as these former legislators, supported the proposal because when only Republicans – who are mostly conservative – can vote, the liberal Republicans have a difficult time getting past the primary elections.

Erin Brewer, the chair of the Oklahoma Democratic Party, said in a media release, “We share the disappointment that SQ836 may not make it to the ballot ...” Democrats hoped that with the proposed “open primary” and so many Republicans running, the GOP vote would be spilt, and Democrats could take the top two spots and be the only ones on the ballot for the General Election. Just look at the current race for Governor, where there are nine Republicans, but only three Democrats running.

On January 26, Oklahomans United for Progress – the proponents of SQ 836 – reported that they had submitted 42 boxes of signed petition pamphlets that included over 200,000 signatures. I even saw one claim that there were over 241,000 signatures. So, I figured we would see the measure on the ballot later this year. It sounded like they probably would have the 172,993 valid signatures they needed. But, when the SOS reported that only 142,567 signatures were verified to be valid, many people were surprised, including myself.

Some supporters of State Question 836 expressed suspicions about why so many signatures were found to be invalid. Democrat leaders, in their March 6 media release said, “The Oklahoma Democratic Party has grave concerns regarding the State of Oklahoma’s untested validation process for signature verification, and supports a thorough review to ensure Oklahomans have a choice on this ballot measure when they vote in November.” And, some of those ignorant of the process even said things like, “I don’t know about you, but my signature never seems to look the same twice.”

Actually, the petition signatures are not compared to the signatures on the voter registration card. That would be a tedious process, and how could you easily determine that it is a matching signature? Instead, the validation process only compares “data points” to determine if the information provided by the signer is likely to be of a registered voter. So, even though reference is made to a signature being invalid or rejected, it is not the actual signature, that is just the nomenclature used. The proper description is “signature lines.”

The SOS office used to manually match the signature line information to the state voter registration database. But in 2020, the Oklahoma Legislature passed House Bill 3826 which gave the SOS the authority to modernize the process. In 2021, Western Petition Systems founded by Bill Shapard was awarded the contract for support of the modernization. I have been acquainted with Bill for a number of years and his other company – Shapard Research – which conducts the Sooner Poll. Contrary to what some critics postulate, Western Petition Systems does not do the signature verification. They provide the hardware and software for the verification, provide the training of SOS staff, and create petition forms that can be accurately scanned. The completed signature pamphlet forms are scanned by the SOS staff and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software is used to convert the handwritten information into a digital form for processing.

Before going into details about the rest of the validation process, let’s review the results for State Question 836. The standard rejection rate for a ballot initiative in Oklahoma is between 20 and 40 percent. In the case of this initiative, it was 32 percent. So, the rejection rate is in the middle range of what would be expected.

The 42 boxes of signature pamphlets submitted for SQ 836 were page numbered 1 through 26,996 and bound into a total of 135 volumes. If all pages were filled with signatures, there could have been as many as 242,964 signatures. But many pages were only partially filled.

Some have nefariously pointed to 205 pages of petition pamphlets being removed or discarded as being suspicions. Those were rejected because the circulator collecting signatures failed to provide the required complete address (or any address at all), or didn’t sign the pamphlet, or because the notary information was missing or incomplete. It was implied that if only those pages had not been discarded, there would have been enough signatures. But, each petition pamphlet has only nine signature lines, so there was only a potential for a maximum of 1,845 signatures on the rejected pages – hardly enough to sink the petition.

After the invalid pages were removed, the remaining pages contained 209,616 signature lines that were available for processing. There were a total of 67,042 signature lines which were found to be invalid for various reasons.

There were 5,761 duplicates (people signed more than once). There were 1,006 lines signed by non-residents (not Oklahomans). There were 516 signers who were not registered to vote. There were 1,746 signatures that were not dated as required by law, and another 163 that were dated outside of the petition-gathering period. And, there were 16 that did not have a signature.

The remaining 57,841 were disqualified for failing to match four or more of the five voter data points: First Name, Last Name, House Number, Zip Code, and Month/Day of Birth (year is not required). So, you could miss one of the five, and the signature line would still be counted as valid. Petition signers are directed on the petition form to write their name as it appears on their voter registration card, however, the software can still match voters with common nicknames such as Jeff for Jeffrey, or Rich for Richard, or Bill for William. Again, you can miss one of the five, and the signature line is still counted as valid. So you could have a totally incorrect first or last name, or the wrong house number address, or the wrong zip code, or the wrong birth month/day, and it is still deemed to be a valid signature.

Critics say the improved verification process is making it too difficult to get initiatives on the ballot. Some states only do a random sample, and if the error rate is high enough to indicate that there would not be enough signatures, only then all checked. With the failure of State Question 836, they worry that this could be the last time an initiative petition makes it to the ballot.

Last year, the Oklahoma Legislature passed Senate Bill 1027 which requires signatures to be gathered from a larger geographic swath of Oklahoma. The number of signatures from any given county is capped at a set percentage of the number of votes cast in that county in the last General Election for Governor. The effect of this reform is that signatures must come from at least 18 of Oklahoma’s 77 counties, rather than just a few urban counties with high populations.

Because of a legal challenge, the legislation was blocked by the Oklahoma Supreme Court from going into effect until the court rules on the challenge. State Question 836 was the first initiative petition that would have been impacted by the changes. But, until the court makes a ruling on the legislation, the collection of signatures on new initiative petitions will continue to be governed by the laws in effect as of November 2024.