Nevada: Card-check opponents rally for state amendment
According to The Review Journal.com:
The possible passage of a new federal law next year has opponents scrambling to tighten state constitutions, including Nevada's.
The Washington, D.C.-based business-backed coalition Save Our Secret Ballot launched a national initiative on Tuesday to tighten voters' rights in state constitutions in anticipation of congressional approval of the Employee Free Choice Act, which would allow card checks for union representation sometime next year.
The efforts will start in Nevada, Utah, Arizona, Arkansas and Missouri, with the campaign spreading to other states in the coming months, according to Ernest Istook, the coalition's chairman and a former congressman from Oklahoma.
"We're acting now to create state constitutional guarantees for secret ballots," said Istook, who is a member of the conservative Heritage Foundation. "We want to avoid the efforts to create a bypass mechanism that can remove a right to secret ballots."
The group is proposing a 47-word amendment to state constitutions that guarantees the secret ballot in union representation elections where "state or federal law requires elections for public office or public votes on initiatives or referenda, or designations or authorizations of employee representation."
The language was authored by Clint Bolick, director of the Goldwater Institute's Scharf-Norton Center for Constitutional Litigation, which has said it will defend the legality of language where challenged.
While some of the organizers are going to work with their states' legislators to have the amendment placed on the state ballots in 2010, Tibi Ellis, the Save Our Secret Ballot's chairwoman in Nevada, said she plans to collect 60,000 signatures to have an initiative before voters.
Ellis said the issue is not a partisan or union issue, but rather it is about the fundamental right to conduct elections by secret ballot, whether for elected office or for labor-organizing efforts.
"Nevada protects the right of a voter by providing a protection of a vote without coercion or intimidation," Ellis said. "We want to make sure any management or employer or other organization will not exert any pressure on any voting process."
Ellis said vague wording already exists in the Nevada Revised Statutes, but it needs to be clarified to include all union elections.
NRS 293.2546 Section 3 reads: "The Legislature hereby declares that each voter has the right to vote without being intimidated, threatened or coerced."
"We all grow up with the assumption that the secret ballot is a right, and it isn't," Ellis said. "And now it's being threatened."
The push for state constitutional amendments guaranteeing secret ballots highlights what is expected to be a big battle between unions and employers in the coming year...click to continue.
