Oklahoma Supreme Court, 5-4, Strikes Down 2025 Law Restricting Initiative Petitions

Status: The Oklahoma Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down Senate Bill 1027 in its entirety, KOSU and KTUL report. The petition statutes that were in force before the 2025 law are back in effect. The ruling applies to future petitions.

Justice Noma Gurich wrote the majority opinion and was joined by four colleagues in the 5-4 decision. Five Oklahoma voters had challenged the law. Because the court concluded that the unconstitutional provisions could not be severed from the rest of the act, it voided SB 1027 as a whole, KTUL reported, rather than leaving some sections in place.

Under SB 1027, no more than 10% of the signatures on a petition could come from a county with more than 400,000 residents. That cap applied only to Tulsa and Oklahoma counties. Those two counties, home to nearly 37% of Oklahoma residents, could together contribute only 20% of a petition's signatures, KOSU reported. The law also capped how many voters in each county could sign, based on turnout in the most recent election for governor, and added other controls: it blocked people outside Oklahoma from donating to a petition campaign or collecting signatures, and it required signature collectors to display whether they were being paid and by whom.

Gurich wrote that the caps violated the First Amendment. "The supposed goal of incorporating more rural voters at the signature gathering stage would impose a significant burden on the right of petition," she wrote, as quoted by KOSU. "The caps seek to achieve the inclusion of some by requiring the exclusion of others."

Justice Dana Kuehn dissented, joined in the result by three colleagues. She wrote that she believed some parts of the law did not comply with the Oklahoma Constitution but that they did not violate the U.S. Constitution, KOSU reported. "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," Kuehn wrote. "Instead, when the signatures are ultimately counted, a certain number will be cutoff when the county threshold is met."

With SB 1027 gone, the prior rules apply. Petitioners have 90 days to collect signatures from 8% of registered voters to propose a statute, or 15% to propose a constitutional amendment, KOSU reported. The decision does not decide a separate challenge to Senate Bill 518 (2024), which tightened how signatures are verified against voter rolls and is at issue in a pending case over an open-primary petition, KOSU reported.