Borgholio wrote:From the Chronicle article, here is the most relevant clip:
City Secretary Anna Russell initially counted enough signatures to qualify the opponents' petition, with about 600 more than the required 17,269 signatures. Feldman then looked through all of the petition pages to see if those who gathered signatures met city charter requirements - namely, whether signature gatherers were Houston residents and whether they signed the petition pages.
That process disqualified more than half the 5,199 pages. In their suit, opponents claimed Russell's original count should be the most important one and alleged Feldman had inserted himself into the process illegally.
So there you have it. The pastors were allegedly using their sermons to collect illegal signatures to challenge a city ordinance. That can not be protected by freedom of speech or religion, since it is basically election fraud.
I find it somewhat contradictory that something like a petition is scrutinized harder than those that show up to do something as important as vote are. Also, I think that voter ID cards would be a great way to help with the validity of the petition, requiring voter ID card number with the signature and such.
But back to the topic at hand, the whole thing is ridiculous. The city passing laws(ordinances) about what bathroom people can use. Yeah, that is a great use of city time . Does anyone know of another major city that has any such ordinance?
And who here is surprised that the religious leaders in the city are opposed to pretty much anything their lesbian mayor is doing?
deathfromthesea wrote:
I find it somewhat contradictory that something like a petition is scrutinized harder than those that show up to do something as important as vote are. Also, I think that voter ID cards would be a great way to help with the validity of the petition, requiring voter ID card number with the signature and such.
While vote fraud happens in the USA, it happens amazingly rarely, about one case per 15 MILLION votes. More people die in car wrecks than commit vote fraud.
deathfromthesea wrote:
I find it somewhat contradictory that something like a petition is scrutinized harder than those that show up to do something as important as vote are. Also, I think that voter ID cards would be a great way to help with the validity of the petition, requiring voter ID card number with the signature and such.
While vote fraud happens in the USA, it happens amazingly rarely, about one case per 15 MILLION votes. More people die in car wrecks than commit vote fraud.
Four times more people die in car wrecks than were killed in the Battle of Gettysburg. Just saying...car wrecks are a bad comparison to use for things like vote fraud.
Patroklos wrote:What the hell do the sermons have to do with establishing the validity of the petition signatures? Either they are elidgable to sign or they are not.
First: 'eligible'.
Second: They're trying to see if the pastors, in their sermons, asked people outside of the jurisdiction where the petition would be applicable to come in and sign the petitions. As I imagine a number of these churches may broadcast their sermons on local television, that could potentially be a fairly decent distance away.
If they can find that this is the case, then that means they were intervening illegally in local politics.
Where they were broadcast has nothing to do with the content of the sermons. Again, what is in the sermons is irrelevant to whether the people who signed the petitions are legit. In fact the whole idea of broadcasting it outside their intended audience is ridiculous. Their only duty is to not knowingly submit unqualified signatures, there is no way to do that reliably by restricting your message broadcast without getting into stupid first amendment issues. That’s something you need to do as someone signs, and how much verification should someone actually have to perform besides asking if they are a resident?
The content of the sermons is relevant because they want to see if they deliberately incited people to sign these petitions that were not supposed to. Something like "Y'all out there, everybody around Houston, come on in, I don't care if you're coming all the way from Dallas, it's your moral duty to come in and sign this".
You can't do that, though. That is basically using your church to meddle in the local politics.
Patroklos wrote:Where they were broadcast has nothing to do with the content of the sermons. Again, what is in the sermons is irrelevant to whether the people who signed the petitions are legit. In fact the whole idea of broadcasting it outside their intended audience is ridiculous. Their only duty is to not knowingly submit unqualified signatures, there is no way to do that reliably by restricting your message broadcast without getting into stupid first amendment issues. That’s something you need to do as someone signs, and how much verification should someone actually have to perform besides asking if they are a resident?
The question is, "Did the pastors ask people to get active and they took it upon themselves to sign these petitions? Or did the pastors deliberately ask people to sign these things knowing that the signatures would be ineligible and just hoping nobody would check? The former is free speech, the latter is a crime.
. Does anyone know of another major city that has any such ordinance?
