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Smokers React To Signature Dispute  

Smokers are holding their collective breath to find out what happens next in the saga over the statewide smoking ban. The petition drive calling for a statewide vote has given them extra time to light up past the July 1 deadline. But with thousands of suspect signatures soon to be reviewed by the Secretary of State, smokers are wondering just how much longer they'll be able to legally puff away inside businesses.

The fate of the statewide smoking ban vote is as much in the air as the smoke that lingers inside Marlin's Roadhouse Grill.

"I guess if they ban it, I'll quit smoking," Chris Bergh said.

A smoking ban would likely affect business at places like Marlin's.

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Statewide vote no longer certain on smoking ban  

Opponents of South Dakota's new state law banning smoking in bars, casinos and restaurants that serve alcohol might not get the chance to put the issue to a statewide vote after all.

That's because the leader of South Dakota's anti-tobacco movement filed a last-hour challenge to their referendum petitions Thursday.

The referendum petitions had prevented the ban from taking effect July 1 at the same time as most other new South Dakota laws passed by the Legislature last session.

If the petitions survive the challenge, a statewide vote would be held as part of the November 2010 general election. But if Jennifer Stalley of the American Cancer Society is right, there won't be a vote at all, and the ban would kick in when the legal dust settles.

Stalley delivered a thick binder to the office of Secretary of State Chris Nelson, whose staff oversees election compliance, challenging the petitions at about 4 p.m. Thursday. The challenge deadline was 5 p.m.

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Vote Proponents Not Surprised, Discouraged 

Proponents of a public vote on South Dakota's smoking ban say the push to remove the issue from next year's ballot isn't surprising; the petition's organizer is still confident the final decision will lie in the hands of South Dakota citizens.

Petition organizers say Thursday's challenge to keep the South Dakota smoking ban from reaching a public vote was to be expected.

"I knew that they would come up with some number that would invalidate or attempt to invalidate the petition," petition organizer Larry Mann said.

Mann says the argument can only challenge the legality of how the Secretary of State's office validated the petition once it received it, steps he believes the election office took properly. . . .

Mann says ban supporters could be doing themselves more harm than good by trying to take the option to vote off the table.

"I think there is a chance for a certain backlash. I think people protect that right to vote," Mann said.

Backlash that serves as a foundation for those who are trying to get the ban on the ballot.

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Supporters of smoking ban seek to stop public vote 

But Jennifer Stalley of the American Cancer Society said she spent the past week checking petition signatures and claims nearly 39 percent are invalid because they do not come from registered voters or contain other flaws.

State election supervisor Kea Warne said the secretary of state's office will consider Stalley's challenge. No one has previously used the state law that allows such a challenge to be filed with the secretary of state because prior challenges of petition signatures for ballot measures have been handled in court, Warne said.

Larry Mann, a lobbyist for video lottery businesses who also heads the coalition that gathered the signatures, said laws dealing with certifying signatures and challenging them seem to conflict. Mann said he would not be surprised if the issue winds up in court.

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• State vote no longer certain on smoking ban for bars, cafés 

Opponents of South Dakota’s new state law banning smoking in bars, casinos and restaurants that serve alcohol might not get the chance to put the issue to a statewide vote after all.

That’s because the leader of South Dakota’s anti-tobacco movement filed a lasthour challenge to their referendum petitions Thursday.

The referendum petitions had prevented the ban from taking effect July 1 at the same time as most other new South Dakota laws passed by the Legislature last session.

If the petitions survive the challenge, a statewide vote would be held as part of the November 2010 general election.

But if Jennifer Stalley of the American Cancer Society is right, there won’t be a vote at all and the ban would kick in when the legal dust settles.

Stalley delivered a thick binder to the office of Secretary of State Chris Nelson, whose staff oversees election compliance, challenging the petitions at about 4 p.m. Thursday. . . .

Stalley is challenging the signatures rather than the sampling method. Nelson wasn’t at the office when Stalley’s challenge documents arrived with just an hour to spare. Bray said the next step is to begin looking at each one of the 9,891 challenges. That work will begin Monday. “We will have to go line by line,” Bray said. If enough of the challenged signatures are found to be invalid, Bray said Nelson then would consult with state Attorney General Larry Long regarding how to proceed.

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GAMOS: Opponents to smoke ban are only delaying a smoke-free South Dakota  

AT ISSUE: Some 25,000 people have signed petitions to bring the statewide ban on smoking in bars and restaurants to a vote of the people. One should fight to the death protecting the right of referring legislation to the public, even to oppose the smoking ban. However, opposing the ban only delays having South Dakota smoke free. Opponents to the smoking ban say the issue is a “matter of choice” issue and a freedom thing. But, in reality it is a pure and simple health issue. . . .

AT THE SAME TIME, this freedom thing the group against the ban is arguing has a tender spot in a lot of people’s psyche. There’s no question about that. They are saying it should be the business person’s right to chose whether or not there should be smoking in his or her establishment.

But how does one measure that against a person’s health? According to the Watertown Tobacco Free Coalition, here are a few of the numerous health effects from just second hand smoke on children: asthma, bronchitis and pneumonia, ear infections, lower respiratory tract infections cancers and leukemia, sudden infant death syndrome and adverse impact on learning and behavioral development.

THEN, WHEN IT comes to first hand smoke (smoking a cigarette), do you realize what some of the well known ingredients of cigarette smoke include?

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Smoking Ban Supporters Say 10,000 Signatures Invalid 

The American Heart Association is crying foul over nearly 10,000 signatures gathered to put the issue on the ballot.

Darrin Smith with the American Heart Association said, "They do not have the minimum number of legitimate valid signatures to qualify for the ballot and that is precisely that challenge that we're using today."

But one of the people who helped get the issue to a public vote believes the signatures will stand.

Larry Mann of Video Lottery Establishments of South Dakota said, "I feel confident that the law, the statute that the secretary uses to validate those signatures was complied with."

But Darin Smith disagrees and says the discrepancies are big enough to overturn the petition right now.

"The most common reason for the nearly 10,000 invalid signatures were very simply, several thousand people who signed the petition sheets were not registered voters," he said.

Larry Mann counters, "Politics is a strange thing and I can't imagine this would be overturned, but if it is, we'll have to discuss it at that time."

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Signature Challenge First Of Its Kind In SD  

Thursday was a historic day in South Dakota. For the first time a group is challenging a petition to put an issue on a statewide ballot. Supporters of a statewide smoke free law filed paperwork with the Secretary of State's office claiming opponents did not collect enough signatures to put a smoking ban on the 2010 ballot.

The South Dakota Secretary of State's office says checking the signatures smoke free supporters are challenging will be a top priority for them.

The Secretary of State's office will start reviewing the nearly 10-thousand challenged signatures Monday to determine whether they are, in fact, invalid. It previously took three people, three days to go through 13-hundred signatures. At that rate, it would take the staff working on the challenge until the middle of August to finish the review. But no matter how long it takes a challenge of a petition this size, on a statewide level, is history in the making.

"This is as Chris called it, 'uncharted territory,' because this has never happened before," Deputy Secretary of State Teresa Bray said.

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Signatures challenged 

A coalition of health advocates on Thursday claimed that almost 10,000 signatures collected by opponents of a statewide smoking ban are invalid.

They filed a formal protest with the secretary of state's office, asking the office to invalidate 9,891 signatures. . . .

The coalition of anti-smoking groups, which had five days to challenge the petition drive, claims that more than 4,000 signatures are from people not registered to vote. Another 3,800 were signed on petitions that were not properly notarized.

Other problems included duplicate signatures, incomplete information and invalid circulators, the challenge says.

"These are black and white issues not necessarily open to interpretation, so we feel very good about the prospects for our challenge," said Darrin Smith, senior director for the American Heart Association and a steering committee member for the South Dakota Tobacco Free Kids Network.

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Smoke Free Supporters Challenge Petition Certification  

Supporters of South Dakota's new smoke-free law are challenging a petition that could force the law to go to a statewide ballot in 2010. The South Dakota Tobacco Free Kids Network has filed the challenge arguing nearly 10,000 of the 25,000 signatures turned in by a group that opposes the recently-passed smoking ban are invalid. After reviewing nearly 1,000 pages of signatures, the group says many of them do not belong to registered voters and as many as 39 percent are not valid.

Jennifer Stalley, project director for the Network, personally signed the affidavit challenging the signatures and says her group believes that 9,891 of the 25,400 signatures submitted to the secretary of state are invalid. The network believes the petition also contains problems with the way some of the signatures were gathered.

"We have respected the rights of the opponents to partake in this process, and this is the next step in that process. We think it is only fair to ask the secretary of state to review the signatures in total, given the law's impact and the immediate need to have it go into effect to preserve the health of those folks who are working in an environment where smoking is currently allowed."

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EDITORIAL: State smoking ban all but certain 

we're glad to see the controversial issue go to the ballot, but we're disappointed another 16 months will pass before public smoking becomes a thing of the past in our state.

This state has already endured a robust debate on public smoking. Before the Legislature passed the proposed ban, the pros and cons were well documented; exceptions were discussed and debated and a vigorous public debate added to the spirited legislative one.

And yet here we are. . . .

One thing seems clear: Unless Stalley's group finds insufficient signatures to force a recount at the Secretary of State's office, we can expect 16 months of robust and spirited debate, again.

And then on one day, in November 2010, we'll put the issue to rest.

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Smoking Ban Signatures Challenged  

South Dakota's statewide smoking ban could go into effect after all and before the November 2010 election. The Tobacco Free Kids Network filed paperwork with the Secretary of State's office late Thursday afternoon contesting the petition to bring the smoking ban to a vote. They claim nearly 10,000 of the 25,000 signatures smoking ban opponents turned in are not valid.

The South Dakota Tobacco Free Kids Network reviewed every page of the petition, more than one thousand, line by line over the past five days. It says it found many of those signatures do not belong to registered voters and that 39 percent are not valid. If the Secretary of State agrees with them, the smoking ban may not appear on next year's ballot.

"It's a very painstaking process and that requires you to be very deliberate and thorough and detail oriented," Darrin Smith with the American Heart Association said.

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• 10,000 Signatures Challenged On Smoking Ban Petition 

Thousands of South Dakota establishments were to have gone smoke free July 1st but didn't because of a petition filed to block it.

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South Dakota's Secretary of State's office tells Action News this is the first time the validity of a state-certified public petition has been challenged. . . .

Today anti-tobacco groups, including the American Heart Association, say nearly 10,000 petition signatures are not valid and they are challenging its validity.

This afternoon, we spoke with the American Heart Association's Darrin Smith. He tells us the challenge was filed with the Secretary of State's office in Pierre at 4 o'clock Thursday afternoon. He said, "Several thousand people who signed the petition sheet are not registered voters. That was a very common mistake, in fact, the most common mistake made. Next, would probably be notary irregularities. There were several thousand signatures that we feel are invalid as a result of that." . . .

We asked Deputy Secretary of State Teresa Bray this afternoon how they will validate the 10,000 signatures in question. "It is quite involved. Just doing the random sampling took us about 3 days to check and that was about 1,300 signatures so you can imagine how long it will take to do 10,000 signatures."

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'The Waxman Report: How Congress Really Works' by Henry Waxman with Joshua Green  

his account of his congressional career is fascinatingly detailed, filled with blunt behind-the-scenes anecdotes and crisply drawn portraits of allies and opponents.

Most of all, it's a detailed inside account of just how the nation's laws are made. It succeeds as storytelling because Waxman and Green have structured most of the book as a series of narrative examples built around major bills. Thus chapters are titled, for instance, "HIV/AIDS and the Ryan White Act," "The Orphan Drug Act," "The Clean Air Act" and "The Tobacco Wars." There's a fascinating chapter on baseball and steroids as well.

Most of all, there's a persuasive declaration of faith in that particular brand of liberalism that the late Arthur Schlesinger called "the politics of remedy." As Waxman puts it, "In Boyle Heights, everyone thought of government as an institution that helped people."

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• POLITICS: Moustache of Justice  

Henry Waxman is to Congress what Ted Williams was to baseball -- a natural. As you read this nicely proportioned, fast- paced book, you realize that Waxman was born to be a member of the House, ideally the chairman of an important committee. He's just five-feet-five, he's woefully short of hair, he's neither charming nor funny, but none of that has mattered. Waxman has been one of the most effective members of Congress for 35 years.

Part of being a natural in Congress is owning a healthy ego. Ego can be the fuel on which the legislative branch runs, and Waxman is in no danger of running out of gas. He makes this clear in the first pages of his book, ably co-authored by Joshua Green, a senior editor of the Atlantic Monthly: "Nearly every worthwhile fight in my career began with my being badly outmatched," Waxman confides. "The other guys always have more money. That's why Congress is so important. Run as it should be, it ensures that no special interest can ever be powerful enough to eclipse the public interest." . . .

In these pages Waxman teaches the importance of good staff work, patience and the willingness to make unexpected alliances to advance your causes. He believes in oversight hearings, Congress's most basic tool, but one that has fallen into disrepair through disuse. He begins and almost ends the book with what must have been his favorite hearing of all time, one he held on April 14, 1994, just months before he and his Democratic colleagues would pass into the minority in the House, a kind of purgatory for an activist like Waxman.

On that occasion Waxman presided over the self-immolation of the seven chief executives of America's biggest tobacco companies, who, despite mountains of compelling evidence to the contrary, testified clumsily and unpersuasively, under oath, that they never believed smoking cigarettes was addictive. This hearing generated no immediate legislation, but it helped destroy the reputation of American tobacco companies and surely contributed to the environment that produced any number of new controls on smoking and the mammoth tobacco settlement with the states in the years that followed. . . .

"The Waxman Report" explains, at least, how Congress can work, and it is fun to read. You finish it with gratitude to the voters of Beverly Hills and nearby areas who keep returning this ornery fellow to the House to challenge entrenched special interests. More Henry Waxmans on both sides of the aisle would give us a much better Congress than the one we've got.

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