Legislature trying to create a smokescreen on the voucher referendum

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Utahns for Public Schools knew the deck was stacked against it in its efforts to overturn House Bill 148 -- the school voucher bill that gives tax breaks primarily to rich, white parents. But the anti-voucher people are just beginning to find out how stacked the deck really is.

The Utah Legislature doesn't like citizens taking laws it passes and placing them before voters. As a result, citizens have only 40 days to collect about 92,000 signatures of registered voters to put such controversial laws on the ballot. However, Utahns for Public Schools volunteers were so committed they gathered more than 130,000 voter signatures in that seemingly impossible time period.

So now HB 148 goes before Utah voters on Nov. 6. But that's not the end of the Legislature's deck-stacking. Someone had to write the impartial ballot title that tries to explain the referendum. And -- surprise, surprise -- that job falls by law to the Legislature's own attorneys. Since those lawyers take orders from the Legislature, it's not surprising that the ballot title fails the sniff test.

Rather than call vouchers what they are -- a tax break for the Utahns who need it the least when the state's public schools are so poorly funded -- the Legislature's lawyers threw up a smokescreen by calling HB 148 "a scholarship program."

When I went to school, we all knew what a scholarship was -- and a scholarship wasn't a tax break for the wealthy. But voters are stuck with that "scholarship" language because the Utah Supreme Court last week ruled "the fact that all the world may be confused by a proposed ballot title alone is not enough."

To change that wording, the justices said the Legislature requires that they would have to find "that the proposed title is clearly false or clearly biased."

Under that requirement, the justices said they were unable to conclude that the ballot title was "substantively false."

As a result, the HB 148 deck-stacking continues, and Utah voters will read a vague and ambiguous ballot title when they enter the voting booth Nov. 6.

Hopefully, they'll overcome the inaccurate ballot language drafted by the Legislature's lawyers and vote against giving away tax money to elite private schools when Utah's public schools face such critical financial needs.

Wakley is a retired Standard-Examiner reporter. He is a volunteer adviser to Utahns for Public Schools.

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