Shawn Griffiths
OKLAHOMA CITY, Okla. - Last week, the Oklahoma campaign to put a nonpartisan all-voter and all-candidate nonpartisan primary initiative on the ballot was informed that it did not collect enough signatures to be certified.
This means state voters won’t get a say on the matter in 2026.
SQ 836 would have opened Oklahoma’s taxpayer-funded primary process to all voters and candidates, regardless of party affiliation, including independent voters who currently are denied a voice under the state's closed partisan system.
The primaries would advance the top two vote-getters to the general election, similar to the systems in place in California and Washington.
Yes on 836 submitted 209,616 petitions to advance its initiative to November. They needed 172,993 to be verified. So, while the campaign gave themselves a little buffer, it was less than 20% of the required total.
“This campaign started with everyday Oklahomans talking about ways we could make our government more accountable and more responsive to the people,” said Oklahoma United Founder and CEO Margaret Kobos, who helped lead the effort.
“That conversation has now become a statewide movement for reform, and I could not be prouder of the volunteers, donors and staff who got us to this point.”
The numbers didn’t work in the campaign's favor this cycle. The standard rejection rate for a ballot initiative campaign of any kind in Oklahoma is between 20-40%. In the case of SQ 836, it was 32%.
67,042 petitions were rejected for a variety of reasons including no date, voters not being registered, and duplicate signatures. However, the bulk of rejections (more than 57,000) were because the petitions did not match 4 of 5 data points in the public voter registration file.
Andy Moore, who supported SQ 836 and is the executive director of the National Association of Nonpartisan Reformers, posted a video about this on Facebook.
“Signatures that would have been valid in 2023 weren’t considered valid for this,” Moore argues. “This is really the first state question to go through the system under the new rules.”
Under Title 34 §§2 and 6 of the Oklahoma Statutes (as amended by the legislature in 2024), the petition form for a proposed ballot measure must include 5 specific voter-identifying data points for each signer. The required fields include:
- Legal first name
- Legal last name
- ZIP code
- House number
- Numerical month and day of birth
Additionally, when signing the petition, the voter must also:
- Sign their name
- Print their name
- Provide birth date, address, and county associated with their voter registration record during the circulator verification process.
Prior to 2024, a typical signer line included:
- Signature
- Printed name
- Address
- City/county
Those who argued for the new requirements asserted that they would improve fraud detection and verification accuracy – and that they would reduce the number of disputes over signatures.
Critics argued that adding more fields would increase the technical rejection rate of otherwise valid signatures – which may have been the case with SQ 836 given that most disqualified signatures were rejected because of this change.
“Tens of thousands of Oklahomans who willfully came out and signed a petition, sought out petition gatherers or found a way to make it happen were denied their constitutional right to petition their government,” said Moore.
He added that the campaign for SQ 836 will do further research into the signatures that were disqualified and promised that the fight for open primaries will continue.
For now, Oklahoma voters will not get to weigh on whether they want their state to open taxpayer-funded primary elections to independent voters and give all candidates a chance to participate in the process from the start.
Oklahoma Lawmakers Recently Passed A Much Tougher Barrier for Ballot Initiative Campaigns
This isn’t the first time in recent years that the Oklahoma Legislature has tightened the rules around the citizen initiative process or made them more restrictive. In fact, a bigger threat to campaigns passed in 2025.
Shawn Griffiths
Notably, the legislature approved SB 1027 which made considerable changes to ballot measures, including:
- Giving the secretary of state the power to remove the summary of a proposed ballot measure (called the gist)
- Allowing voters to rescind their signatures and challenge a petition’s gist before signature gathering begins
- Requiring petition gatherers to be registered Oklahoma voter
- Requiring the disclosure of any payment to petition gatherers and its source
- Prohibiting payment to petition gatherers from out-of-state sources.
The law also places restrictions on how many signatures can be collected in each county: 11.5% of votes cast in the most recent gubernatorial election for statutory changes, and 20.8% for constitutional amendments.
While supporters of the law argue that it will give rural voters a stronger voice, Oklahoma already has the lowest voter turnouts in the country. This means regardless of county, most voters are shut out.
The Oklahoma Policy Institute reported in June 2025 that there were more than 2.3 million registered voters in Oklahoma, of which 1.15 million voters participated in the last gubernatorial election.
The institute concluded:
“When applying SB 1027’s formula statewide, its requirement would exclude 2.2 million registered voters (or 94.4% of registered voters) from signing a petition for statutory amendments; it would exclude 2.1 million registered voters (or 89.8% of registered voters) from signing a petition for constitutional amendments.”
The campaign for SQ 836 argued in court that the law should not retroactively apply to its initiative because the measure was filed before the law was passed. The Oklahoma Supreme Court agreed.
However, the court did not strike down the law. Unless there is a successful legal challenge against SB 1027, any future citizen-led effort to reform elections in Oklahoma will be subject to these rules.