What is Petition Blocking? From Ballotpedia.

Petition blocking refers to organized efforts to prevent citizen initiatives or candidates from collecting sufficient signatures to qualify for ballot access, and to legal efforts to remove a measure or candidate from the ballot after they have been certified by the election official in a given state.

Petition blocking can take a variety of forms. In 2001, a representative of the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center is alleged to have encouraged unions at an AFL-CIO sponsored meeting in Oregon to run signature-blocking campaigns. These efforts, the representative said, “force your opposition to spend more money or volunteer hours gathering signatures.”

Other presenters at that meeting suggested that “progressives take a more aggressive approach toward chronic right-wing ballot proponents … by launching all out media, legal, and research assaults on their agenda, credibility, motives, and funders.”[1]

If opponents of a ballot measure can prevent the measure from reaching the ballot through a successful petition blocking campaign, they may save considerable sums of money that they would otherwise have to spend in a general election contest to persuade voters not to approve the measure.

Green Party candidate Ralph Nader filed a lawsuit in late October 2007 against the Democratic National Committee, accusing the DNC of conspiring to keep his name off state ballots in 2004 through signature blocking efforts.

Petition Blockers are becoming more and more blunt about their attempts to block free speech from taking place. The blockers now do anything and everything possible to make the lives of signature gatherers miserable and to discourage citizens from exorcising their constitutional right to petition the government.

This blog is in place to document those who actively seek to limit free speech… specifically, Petition Blockers.