Letter: Petition process unfairly amplifies smaller counties

Friday, Nov. 28, 2003 | 8:34 a.m.

Your recent editorial surprisingly defended an undemocratic initiative petition process that gives more power to one sparsely populated rural county than to populous Clark County with over two-thirds of Nevada's population.

For example, in 2000 I circulated an initiative petition that would have given the voters of Clark County the right to break up our oversized and poorly performing school district into smaller, more responsive community-based districts. Although we obtained enough signatures overall (most of them in Clark County), because we did not gather sufficient signatures in tiny Mineral County, the citizens of Clark County were denied the right to make changes in our own school district.

Whatever happened to the concept of one-man-one-vote?

The initiative petition procedure that currently gives one tiny county with a few hundred voters more power than populous Clark County is the last vestige of an unfair system that was declared unconstitutional decades ago. There was a time in Nevada when each county had one state senator irrespective of its population. The state assembly was also weighted in favor of the less populated counties to the detriment of Clark County.

However, in 1965, the U.S. District Court in Nevada, in the case of Dungan v. Sawyer, ruled that both houses of our Legislature must be apportioned on a strict population basis.

It is now time to conform our initiative petition process to the one-man-one-vote requirement applicable to legislative apportionment. That's why I have joined as a plaintiff to overturn the current initiative requirement that discriminates against the voters of Clark County.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has already ruled that a similar undemocratic initiative requirement in Idaho violates the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution. I am confident that the federal court will also overturn the discriminatory Nevada requirement.

SANDRA TIFFANY

Editor's note: Sandra Tiffany is a Republican state senator whose district includes Henderson.