Key Points

  • The Oklahoma Supreme Court, 5-4, held that several key provisions of Senate Bill 1027 violate the U.S. and Oklahoma Constitutions.
  • The majority struck the county signature caps, the registered-voter requirement for circulators, the new gist rules, the per-signature pay ban, the out-of-state contribution ban and the new disclosure and reporting requirements.
  • Because the unconstitutional provisions were not severable, the court declared the entire act void, leaving the earlier petition statutes unaffected.
  • Vice Chief Justice Kuehn would have upheld parts of the act, including the per-signature pay ban, and Special Justice Huber, joined by Kuehn and Justice Kane, would have upheld the county caps as a counting rule.
  • Parties have ten days from the opinion's filing to seek rehearing, and the court said that deadline will not be extended.

The Oklahoma Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down a 2025 law that tightened the rules for putting citizen initiatives on the ballot, holding that its limits on who may sign, circulate and pay for petitions violate the First Amendment and the Oklahoma Constitution.

The 5-4 decision, written by Justice Gurich, went to four registered voters who challenged Senate Bill 1027. The respondents are Secretary of State Benjamin Lepak and Attorney General Gentner Drummond. Because the invalid provisions could not be separated from the rest, the majority voided the whole act. "S.B. 1027 is unconstitutional and void in its entirety and lacks legal enforceability," Gurich wrote.

The ruling undoes a seven-section law, effective May 23, 2025, that imposed county signature caps, required circulators to be registered Oklahoma voters, added content rules for the gist (the short summary printed atop each signature sheet), banned per-signature pay, barred out-of-state money for circulation and added new disclosure duties. The earlier statutes, the court wrote, are "unaffected."

The challengers, Steven Craig McVay, Amy Cerato, Kenneth Ray Setter and Anthony Stobbe, said the amendments make the petition process "prohibitively expensive." Setter and Stobbe are named proponents of State Question 836. The state did not contest their standing, and the court took the case under its original jurisdiction after argument on Nov. 18, 2025.

The sharpest dispute concerned the caps, which limited signatures collected from any one county to 11.5 percent of the votes cast there in the last governor's race, or 20.8 percent for a constitutional amendment. Gurich wrote that the caps bar voters from signing once their county's limit is reached. Harmon County had 1,378 registered voters as of Jan. 1, 2026, and only 75 could sign a given statutory petition, which the opinion said "makes it extremely unlikely that signature collection efforts would ever step foot in Harmon County (or any other rural county)."

The state had defended the caps as "encourag[ing] initiative campaigns to go into suburban and rural Oklahoma counties for signatures." The majority found the caps did not achieve that goal and that "enhancing rural representation does not justify severely burdening fundamental First Amendment rights." It also held that the caps make it impossible to meet the state constitution's 25 percent threshold for re-proposing a rejected measure within three years, a "mathematical reality" the state conceded at argument.

The circulator rule fell under Buckley v. American Constitutional Law Foundation, the 1999 U.S. Supreme Court decision striking down Colorado's requirement that circulators be registered Colorado voters. Buckley "directly addressed such a requirement and controls," the majority wrote. The court also voided the gist rules, which demanded basic dictionary words, barred "code words" and partiality, and required a fiscal-impact statement. Treating them as content-based limits on core political speech, the majority wrote that "Respondents have not provided any justification for further restrictions or requirements."

The state argued that the per-signature pay ban "reduces the incentives for circulators to rush, commit fraud, or browbeat Oklahomans into signing." Citing Meyer v. Grant, the 1988 decision striking down Colorado's ban on paying circulators at all, the majority wrote that "In the absence of any indication of fraud, Respondents have failed to justify the burden Section 8(G) places on protected speech."

The court also struck the ban on funding circulation by anyone who does not "reside or do business in this state." The state said the ban guarded against the risk "that in-state voices and advocates will be drowned out by a large volume of purely out-of-state participants." Applying Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, the majority held that the ban discriminates among speakers and "is not a narrowly tailored means" to address that risk.

The disclosure rules failed in part because they had no dollar threshold. "A circulator paid $7.25 to circulate a petition for one hour must disclose their payor to the Secretary of State," Gurich wrote. Because the state acknowledged that the reports would not name individual donors, the court said they "do not actually help the public identify the forces behind the initiative or assess the merits of the initiative."

The act contained a severability clause. The majority nonetheless said it was "not prepared to presume the Legislature would have enacted the remaining provisions without those already deemed void." Justices Winchester, Edmondson, Combs and Darby joined Gurich.

Chief Justice Rowe, Vice Chief Justice Kuehn, Justice Kane and Special Justice Huber dissented. "Under our Constitution, some of S.B. 1027 falls and some of it stands," Kuehn wrote. Kuehn would have struck the secretary's gist review, the residency rule, the funding ban, the fiscal statement and the weekly expense reports, but would have upheld the paid-circulator notice and the per-signature pay ban, among other provisions. "Meyer struck down a ban on paying circulators at all. Oklahoma's law leaves paid circulation in place," Kuehn wrote, adding that the majority, "Having noted the split" among federal appeals courts, "adopts the stricter standard without explaining why."

Huber, joined by Kuehn and Kane, read the county caps as a rule about which signatures count, not who may sign. "Citizens who want to sign an initiative or referendum petition are free to do so and are not stripped of any First or Fourteenth Amendment rights at the time of signing," Huber wrote.

Lawyers for the challengers included Randall J. Yates of Crowe & Dunlevy. The state officials were represented by Gary M. Gaskins II of the Office of Attorney General. Bob Burke filed an amicus statement for Robert Henry.

A related original action, Case No. 123,180, challenges the law's application to State Question 836. Any petition for rehearing is due within ten days of the opinion's filing, with five more days for a response. "This time limitation will not be extended," the court wrote.