Pair propose ‘juries’ to aid voters

By David Steves

The jury - 12 ordinary citizens gathered to weigh the facts and determine a defendant's guilt or innocence - has served Oregon's legal system since statehood.

Now, a political reform group wants juries to help Oregon voters judge ballot initiatives.

A pair who met in graduate school at the University of Oregon, Tyrone Reitman and Elliot Shuford, have formed Healthy Democracy Oregon, which plans to recruit citizens of various ages, party affiliations, education levels and geographic regions to serve on a 24-member citizens' jury this fall.

According to their plan, the jurors will spend several days at Salem's Chemeketa Community College studying and discussing a yet-to-be-selected initiative and issue their independent assessment and recommendation to voters.

Reitman, who lives in Eugene, said he became convinced that Oregon needed to improve its discourse around initiatives while working on campaign finance reform measures in 2004 and 2006. Between the ads and mail pieces and pro/con arguments in the official voters' pamphlet, Oregonians hear too many wildly exaggerated predictions of what would come from passage or defeat of the initiatives before them - but not enough honest, reasoned debate, he said.

Shuford, a fellow UO grad student, agrees that voters need a counterweight to campaign advertising and political spin when it comes to sizing up initiatives. So he and Reitman started casting about for ways to put more useful information before the voters. In the course of their research, they came across an idea that a Minnesota political scientist put forth in the 1970s, and which had been a hot concept in the 1990s before the American political system seemed to cool to the idea: citizens' juries.

"To me, that seemed like a really good reform proposal for Oregon's initiative process," Reitman said. He and Shuford will outline their proposal today at a meeting of the City Club of Eugene.

Not everyone in the initiative business agrees. Veteran initiative promoter Kevin Mannix said he met with Healthy Democracy Oregon and quickly became skeptical.

"It's just another filter established by the political elite who think that the people don't know how to vote," said Mannix, a Republican who plans to put two anti-crime initiatives on this fall's ballot. "The jury I want is the jury of the voters who cast their ballot. That's what the initiative system is all about."

Dan Meek, a left-of-center activist who worked with Reitman on the recent campaign finance reform measures, said he appreciates the new group's intentions, but questions whether a group that is dubious about the initiative system can facilitate reviews of proposed ballot measures without a built-in bias against them.

"What if the facilitator was Bill Sizemore or me?" he said, referring to one of Oregon's best-known, anti-tax and anti-union initiative activists. "I don't think the political establishment in Salem would appreciate that. So do I want people from the political establishment putting something in the voters' pamphlet that is ostensibly a neutral statement? The answer is ‘no.' "

If they pull it off, Oregon's initiative review will be the first citizens' jury to assess a ballot initiative. But it would hardly be the first time the model has tapped ordinary citizens to shape public opinion. In the 1970s, the concept was pioneered by Minneapolis-based political scientist Ned Crosby, who founded a think tank to advance the idea.

His Jefferson Center eventually saw its citizens' juries used to evaluate candidates in mayoral, gubernatorial and Senate races in Minnesota and Pennsylvania. It's also conducted such panels to help inform a local school district about the arts in education, to evaluate national health care reform plans and the budget deficit in 1993, and to consider more than two dozen other issues and campaigns.

The idea also has caught on abroad, Crosby said, with more than 200 citizens' juries in Great Britain and more being conducted in Australia, Austria, Spain, India and elsewhere.

Despite such interest, the Jefferson Center's work faded by the late 1990s, in large part, Crosby said, because the Internal Revenue Service ruled its tax-exempt status required that it no longer take part in campaigns.

Crosby and his wife, Pat Benn, eventually laid off the Jefferson Center's staff, moved to Port Townsend, Wash., and reduced the center's operations to a Web site.

Crosby said he is excited that the two Oregon reformers have picked up on the citizens' jury idea he helped champion. He also said he was "very lucky" to be a descendent of one of the founders of General Mills, which means he's able to personally underwrite Healthy Democracy Oregon's operational costs.

Both Crosby and Reitman say their long-term goal is for the fall experiment to help convince the 2009 Legislature to adopt the system, providing about $1.5 million for staff, jury participants' expenses and a small stipend, and to put their findings on initiatives in the Oregon Voters' Pamphlet.

"Our hope is that the Legislature will say, ‘Hey, here's a way to help the voters of Oregon take a fresh look and a new look at initiatives in Oregon,' and they will move ahead on it," Crosby said.

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