Teachers Union Gives Up On Trying to Challenge Our Signatures

Our Strong Signature Count Convinces Them Not to Bother

The Teachers Union ran a “blocking campaign” to try to convince voters not to sign our Roll Back the Sales Tax petitions — which failed miserably. Apparently, they’ve elected to pass on dumping more money into a fruitless effort to keep us off the ballot by challenging our petition signatures.

On December 23, 2009, the Elections Division of the Secretary of the Commonwealth confirmed that no group has even reviewed our signatures. Challengers have until January 6, 2010 to file a challenge. Anyone who’s intending to file would be busy at work by now building their case.

After rejecting certain voter signatures for technicalities such as “stray marks” on petition sheets, the Elections Division certified 74,131 of our signatures — more than 7,500 over the requirement of 66,593.

This means that the Teachers Union — the primary opponents of giving taxpayers relief from Massachusetts’ 5th-highest-in-the-nation-and-rising taxes — learned their lesson in 2007 when we launched our End the Income Tax initiative. They’re only wasting their time and money trying to knock us off the ballot.

In 2007, we had a similar large cushion of certified signatures over the requirement — normally considered way too many for a successful challenge. But the Teachers Union took a shot at us anyway. They brought in 20 scanners to make high-quality copies of every petition: approximately 30,000 sheets of two-sided paper. They retained a high-powered Beacon Hill attorney. And they paid a telemarketing firm to call every voter for which they could get a phone number to see if they could make a case for voter fraud. But this was not nearly enough. They gave up and never filed a formal challenge.

Apparently they learned their lesson. The Teachers Union can’t knock us off with such a strong showing of voter support.

So…our signature drive was a success! We’ve overcome the major hurdle required to make the 2010 ballot, and we’re moving forward!

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