Fix the initiative process before our next election cycle
- Bruce Botelho
- 16 hours ago
- 3 min read
By Bruce Botelho
The Assembly should close a costly loophole in Juneau’s election code for citizen initiatives. The current ambiguity around when petitioners get extra time to gather signatures undermines the charter’s clear standards and invites unequal treatment from one campaign to the next.
The Juneau Municipal Charter lays out a simple, orderly process for initiatives and referenda.
First, Section 7.3 requires that a petition “shall be filed in proper form with the clerk within thirty days after the date of issuance of petition pages” and that it “shall be signed by a number of qualified municipal voters equal to at least twenty-five percent of the votes cast in the municipality at the preceding regular municipal election.”
In plain language: you get 30 days, and on day 30 the petition must bear at least the minimum number of signatures.
Second, Section 7.6 gives the clerk 10 days after filing “to certify the petition if it bears the required number of signatures.” This is the time for detailed verification — checking that signatures are valid and voters qualified — not for the petitioners to keep collecting.
Third, Section 7.7 provides a safety valve only if the petition “is determined to be insufficient.” In that case, the clerk sends notice and the petitioners “may be supplemented by additional signatures within ten days following the date of receipt of the notice.” That 10-day period is meant to cure latent defects — bad or invalid signatures discovered during examination — not to fix an obvious failure to meet the threshold on its face.
Read together, the charter establishes a two-step system: 30 days to gather enough signatures, then 10 days for the clerk to examine them, and only then, if necessary, 10 additional days to cure technical or validity problems.
The CBJ election code attempts to implement this framework, but one key gap has created confusion and inconsistency. CBJ 29.10.060 requires petitioners to file all petition booklets “as a single instrument” and bars the clerk from accepting additional booklets after filing. This protects the integrity of the 30-day limit.
Yet nowhere does the ordinance require the election official, at the moment of filing, to determine whether the booklets collectively contain enough signatures to meet the 25% requirement on their face. That omission has opened the door to a misreading: that a petition that plainly falls short of the minimum number of signatures within 30 days can still be “filed,” examined, and then “supplemented” with 10 more days of collection time.
That practice is contrary to the logic of the charter. If the drafters had intended to give petitioners 40 days to reach the 25% threshold, they could have written that directly. They did not.
Juneau is not operating in a vacuum. When the State of Alaska allowed for ballot curing, it followed the same conceptual model: an initial period to gather signatures, an administrative review, and a limited opportunity to cure deficiencies that emerge during scrutiny — not to fix a petition that was obviously short from the start.
A 1984 attorney general’s opinion made this distinction explicit, concluding that a supplemental petition is appropriate only when a petition believed to be sufficient on its face is later found to be insufficient because some signers are not qualified voters. In other words, a latent defect in the count can be cured. A patent defect — too few signatures on its face — cannot. A petition that does not meet the numerical threshold when it is submitted may not be accepted for filing and later supplemented to cure that obvious deficiency.
Juneau’s charter and code fall squarely within this longstanding understanding. It is only recent practice that has drifted toward treating the 10-day supplemental period as a de facto extension of the initial 30-day signature-gathering window.
Leaving this ambiguity in place creates several problems: it invites unequal treatment, it undermines the charter, it increases the risk of litigation and it confuses citizens. People who volunteer, sign and organize around initiatives deserve predictable, transparent rules.
The solution is straightforward. The Assembly should amend CBJ 29.10.060 to make explicit what the charter implies and what good practice requires: that, at filing, the election official must determine whether the petition, on its face, meets the 25% signature requirement.
Citizen initiatives are a vital tool of local democracy. They deserve a process that is firm, clear and faithful to the charter that Juneau voters approved.
By adopting a modest amendment to CBJ 29.10.060, the Assembly can remove the current ambiguity, safeguard the integrity of the initiative process, and ensure that future petitioners — and future clerks — know exactly where they stand on day 30.
• Bruce Botelho is a former Juneau mayor and Alaska attorney general, and president of the Juneau Independent’s board of directors.
