If Measure 54 passes today, thank Grant High students

By Margie Boule

I f you've ever stopped to think about it, you may have assumed most ballot measures are conceived in smoke-filled backrooms, where politicos pushing their own agendas get together to figure out how to fool the public into voting for measures they barely understand.

Ballot Measure 54 was birthed in a classroom at Grant High School in Portland.

There was no smoke.

The Grant High School Constitution Team was meeting in the spring of 2006 to continue its preparations for an annual competition, sponsored by the Classroom Law Project, in which knowledge of the U.S. Constitution is tested in a simulated congressional hearing.

The father of one of the Constitution Team members stood to address the team and its coaches. "I was going to an election-law conference in Washington, D.C., and was reading through relevant Oregon statutes and constitutional provisions," Portland attorney Roy Pulvers said, "and I noticed this particular provision."

It was Article VIII, Section 6 in the Oregon Constitution, and it stipulates that anyone voting in a school board election must be at least 21, be able to read and write English, and have lived in the school district for at least six months.

Roy believed the requirements were unconstitutional. The Grant High Constitution Team agreed and decided to take action.

"We met at my house to talk about what the options were for changing it," says Evan Pulvers, Roy's daughter who was on the Constitution Team.

The students discussed filing a civil suit. "But ultimately we decided it wasn't the goal," Evan said. ". . . We could file a civil suit and they would say, 'This is unenforceable,' but we already knew that.

"We decided to make it so that the Oregon Constitution reflects the values of Oregonians. We didn't want to just have it recognized that this part of the Oregon Constitution was unenforceable, but to make it so this part of the Oregon Constitution doesn't exist."

The students broke into small groups, each of which did research and then wrote part of a long letter to Oregon's secretary of state.

Paddy McGuire was deputy secretary of state in Oregon in 2006. He remembers when the letter came in. It was clear, he says, "they'd been digging through the Oregon Constitution. We sent a letter to the attorney general to take a look at (the section) and get an opinion. They said, basically, (the section) is there but it's inoperative. So that kicked the whole thing off, to get the constitution fixed."

Secretary of State Bill Bradley, everyone agrees, was highly supportive.

It wasn't the first time his office had proposed changes to Oregon's Constitution, Paddy says. A few years ago it was discovered there was a constitutional requirement that Oregon legislators be 21 or older, but no such requirement for other officeholders. "So the secretary of state could be 18, while House members have to be 21," Paddy says. "It was a weird little quirk."

The Legislature agreed and referred an amendment to voters. "It was defeated," Paddy says. So to this day, it is possible for Oregon to have an 18-year-old secretary of state.

"There's all sorts of kind of wacky stuff left over in the Oregon Constitution," Paddy says. "This was one we looked at and said it just doesn't make sense. It needs to be gone."

The secretary of state's office sponsored legislation in 2007 to put a constitutional amendment on the ballot, to eliminate Section 6. Grant High Constitution Team members were still involved in the process.

Some had graduated, all had been replaced by new team members, but about 10 former Constitution Team members continued to participate. Evan, Ethan Gross and Hannah Fisher all testified in favor of the bill.

Section 6 didn't belong in Oregon's Constitution, they said, for reasons including due process and equal protection rights, and the passage of the 26th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which lowered the voting age to 18.

The bill passed the Oregon House and Senate with only one opposing vote. That's why it's on the ballot as Measure 54. It's likely the measure will pass today; there's been no opposition.

Evan Pulvers is now 20 and a student at Brown University, spending this semester in an exchange program at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Miss. Attending a historically black college amid the Obama campaign has been "really interesting," she says.

But even from a distance, Evan will be closely following the fate of Ballot Measure 54. If it passes, "it will be nice to see it change, and nice to know I was a part of it."

She recently got an e-mail from neighbors here in Portland. "They have two boys who are 11 and 8, and they had explained to the boys that they were voting on 'Evan's measure.'

"That felt very cool."