We doubt there are any fair-and-balanced attempts to criminalize signature-gathering for ballot petitions, but we still like NewAmerica.net’s blog post, commenting on one of our own posts:

The leader of the term limits movement and two other organizers of a petition drive [Paul Jacob, Susan Johnson, and Rick Carpenter] in Oklahoma are under state indictment there on charges they broke laws related to out of state signature gathering. The indictment lookis like an over-the-top attempt by state attorney general Drew Edmondson to criminalize signature gathering in a state that is already the most difficult state to qualify an initiative in. Oklahoma has the shortest time period for gathering signatures–90 days–which in and of itself puts the lie to claims by officials there that they want to make signature gathering a grass roots process. With such a short time period, paid petition circulators are the only way to qualify a measure; no grass roots operation can gather enough signatures that fast….

A look at legal precedent suggests that eventually, Jacob and his co-defendants, who are free on bail, will beat these charges. But there’s enough worry that the site is blogging about a prison fight at the Oklahoma State Reformatory.

We trust the optimism is justified. But who could have predicted that such a completely groundless assault would have been launched against the Oklahoma Three to begin with?