The campaign to ban affirmative action in five states has suffered its first loss with Ward Connerly, chief backer of the effort, saying Monday he is abandoning the Oklahoma campaign for lack of enough signatures on petitions to get the issue on the November voting ballot.
Connerly opponents, a coalition of traditional civil rights advocates including the American Civil Liberties Union and NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, hailed the Connerly camp decision, filed in court papers last Friday. They had contested the validity of petition signatures turned into and accepted by the secretary of state.
“We knew it was going to be a problematic campaign in Oklahoma, but we decided to roll the dice anyway,” Connerly said Monday in a telephone interview. “It was just a miscalculation. We’re not going to waste anymore time or money on it,” this year, he said. “We’ll be back.”
The decision to bail out of Oklahoma, where Connerly’s ballot initiative was expected to easily win approval this fall by the state’s overwhelmingly conservative voters, narrows his “Super Tuesday Equal Rights Campaign” to four states — Arizona, Colorado, Missouri and Nebraska. Voters would be asked to ban race and gender “preferences” in public college admissions and awarding of government contracts.
The one state in the ‘safe’ column to date is Colorado, Connerly said. The other three are engaged in petition drives and, in the case of Missouri, a court fight. Connerly said he would now focus his money and energy on those states, in hopes of having proposed constitutional amendments on ballots in at least three states.
The surprise move in Oklahoma followed an early March court challenge by the ACLU and its coalition of Connerly opponents. In papers filed with the Oklahoma Supreme Court, the coalition objected to the “signature count verified by the secretary of state.”
The Secretary of State said the Connerly forces appeared to have sufficient signatures to get on the ballot based on a numerical count, although there were “large numbers of duplicate names and addresses discovered well into the signature counting process” and that there were likely to be more.
