Vol. 74/No. 35      September 20, 2010

The ruling involved a ballot petition for a referendum challenging a new state law in Washington that extends legal rights to same-sex domestic partners.

Organizations supporting the law, including WhoSigned.org and KnowThyNeighbor.org, had announced that they would put the signers’ names and addresses on a Web site, urging people to make “uncomfortable” conversations with those who had signed in their area.

On August 11 U.S. District Judge Benjamin Settle issued a temporary order barring Washington State from releasing the names of the petition signers. He acted on the basis of a “narrower challenge” allowed by the June 24 Supreme Court ruling that making public the names on this particular petition would violate the right to free speech, because individuals might be subject to “violence and harassment.”

The big majority on the Supreme Court who endorsed releasing names and addresses of petition signers to the public included all the justices who are counted as “liberal” in the bourgeois press. Sonia Sotomayor, the newest member of the court recently appointed by President Barack Obama, pushed aside any argument that petition signers had a First Amendment right to privacy in such cases, writing that “legislating by referendum is inherently public.”

The only justice to oppose the ruling was Clarence Thomas, who wrote that signing to put a measure on the ballot “necessarily entails political speech and association under the First Amendment.” He added that the decision “severely burdens those rights and chills citizen participation in the referendum process.”

The debate in the court included arguing the relevancy of previous decisions concerning state disclosure of the names of supporters of political candidates. These included precedents won by the Socialist Workers Party protecting campaign contributors from having their names publicized by the government, providing an “enemy’s list” to government agencies, employers, and rightists for harassment and victimization.

The Supreme Court ruling mandating disclosure was hailed by the New York Times, which ran an editorial “Full Disclosure,” stating that “the Supreme Court was right … to rule that there is no constitutional right to hide in the shadows when signing a referendum petition.”

At issue in this fight is the right of the working class to participate in politics free from harassment and victimization. The capitalist rulers support decisions such as the one in Washington State in order to intimidate and put obstacles in the way of working people taking the road of independent political action.

Public disclosure and other such election reforms, often touted as safeguards against elections being stolen by big money interests, open the door to efforts by the major parties to force not only working-class candidates off the ballot, but even lesser capitalist rivals.

In Pennsylvania several candidates who petitioned to be on the ballot in 2010 were forced off after challenges filed by Democratic and Republican candidates and their supporters. Those ruled off included candidates of the Green Party, the Libertarian Party, and a self-proclaimed Tea Party member.  
 
 
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