Administrative Law

Ohio's Hourly Wage Requirement for Petition Circulators Struck Down

By Eric L. Lipman

In an interesting opinion issued yesterday, a unanimous panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit struck down an Ohio statute which provided that professional petition circulators could only be paid on an hourly basis.

Because the appellant, Citizens for Tax Reform, was able to establish that the hourly wage requirement made it far more costly to produce the number of signatures needed to qualify a proposed constitutional amendment, when compared to paying petition circulators on either a per-signature or per-volume basis, the appellate panel held that the Ohio law unconstitutionally burdened political activity protected by the First Amendment. (The Ohio law made collecting signatures for pay, on a per-signature or per-volume basis, a felony.)

Yesterday?s opinion glides past other rulings, notably from appellate panels in the Second, Eighth and Ninth Circuits, which upheld similar ? although admittedly less restrictive ? regulations on petition circulator compensation.

The Sixth Circuit panel?s analysis, and its discussion of how those other cases were distinguishable, is accessible here.

Full post as published by Within the Scope on March 06, 2008 (boomark / email).