Two Down, Three to Go.

by Fatima Goss Graves, Senior Counsel
National Women’s Law Center

Ward Connerly. In some ways, Connerly introduced me to activism. In 1995 I was a student at UCLA (Go Bruins!) when he announced his campaign to eliminate affirmative action in the University of California system. At the young age of 19, I attended my first protest and learned to articulate the many reasons that Connerly’s initiative would be bad for California and bad for UC students. Unfortunately, despite the strong efforts of students and activists throughout California (and indeed the nation) Connerly succeeded first in implementing anti-affirmative action measures in the UC System and then, through the passage of Prop 209, throughout the state of California. 

Connerly followed up his “success” in California with statewide initiatives in the state of Washington (Prop. 200) and most recently in Michigan (Prop. 2). The California and Washington initiatives have been in place long enough that we can measure their detrimental effects. And our fears about these initiatives have come true – we now know that the passage of these initiatives resulted in a decrease in the percentage of women working in the skilled trades, fewer valuable science and math programs that target women and minorities, and fewer government contracts for women and minority small businesses.   

Now Connerly is proposing a “Super-Tuesday” of anti-affirmative action measures in Colorado, Arizona, Missouri, Nebraska, and Oklahoma. But fortunately for the residents of Missouri, Connerly has been stopped in his tracks there. Last week, his campaign announced that it had failed to garner enough signatures for a petition to change the constitution to ban affirmative action.   

And in Oklahoma, Connerly’s team requested that a similar petition be withdrawn. A smart move, given that the petition barely exceeded a minimum number of signatures – and that small number included a large number of duplicate signatures! 

Connerly is also facing legal challenges in Colorado where opponents of the measure have documented the trickery his team has used to gather signatures. 

That still leaves Arizona and Nebraska for Connerly’s Super Tuesday (not seeming so super anymore) - the deadlines for filing petitions in those states are in July. 

Let’s just hope that the Colorado, Arizona and Nebraska initiatives will go the same way as Missouri and Oklahoma – absolutely nowhere.