All Political Power Is Inherent in the People — Until SB 1027.

Article II, Section 1 of the Oklahoma Constitution opens with the plainest sentence in the document: “All political power is inherent in the people.” Then comes Article V, Section 1, which gives that power a working method: the people may propose laws by petition, gather signatures, and put any measure they want before the voters of Oklahoma. The Constitution does not require the Governor’s approval. It does not require the Legislature’s permission. It belongs to the people. Whole-cloth, by design, from the founding of the state.

In 2025, the Oklahoma Legislature passed Senate Bill 1027 and Governor Stitt signed it. SB 1027 does not abolish the citizen initiative. It does something more careful. It rewrites the rules of signature collection in a way that, on the page, looks procedural, and in practice makes the initiative process functionally unusable by ordinary Oklahomans.

This site exists to lay out what the bill actually does, who voted for it, and what it means for the sentence that opens the second article of our Constitution.

What SB 1027 Does

SB 1027 establishes county-level caps on signature gathering. For a statutory petition, the number of valid signatures collected in any single county may not exceed 11.5 percent of the total votes cast for governor in that county in the most recent general election. For a constitutional amendment, the cap is 20.8 percent.¹

The plain effect of those numbers is to require that a successful statewide petition draw signatures from a wide geographic range of counties. The political effect is different. The Oklahoma Policy Institute, examining the math, found that SB 1027 “would effectively exclude millions of registered voters from being able to sign an initiative petition.”² A registered voter in Oklahoma County or Tulsa County, where roughly forty percent of Oklahomans live, may find their signature thrown out not because anything is wrong with it but because the cap for their county has been reached.

SB 1027 also requires every signature gatherer to be a registered Oklahoma voter, bans out-of-state entities from paying gatherers, prohibits per-signature compensation, requires paid gatherers to disclose who is paying them, and gives the Secretary of State broader authority to reject the “gist” — the plain-language summary printed at the top of every signature sheet — before circulation begins.² Similar voter-registration requirements for circulators and bans on out-of-state funding have been struck down by courts in other states. The drafters appear to have anticipated this: SB 1027 includes a severability clause designed to preserve the rest of the bill if any single provision is found unconstitutional.³

Who Voted For It

SB 1027 was authored by Sen. David Bullard, Republican of Durant.⁴ Senate President Pro Tempore Lonnie Paxton is named on the enrolled bill as a co-author, along with Sen. Travis Jett. In the House, the bill was co-authored by Speaker Kyle Hilbert, Republican of Bristow.⁵

The bill moved through six recorded votes in three months. The Senate Judiciary Committee approved SB 1027 on March 4, 2025, by a vote of 7 to 2.⁶ Two weeks later, on March 18, the full Senate passed the bill on Third Reading, 36 to 8 — along party lines. Every Republican senator voted in favor. All eight Senate Democrats — Boren, Brooks, Dossett, Goodwin, Hicks, Kirt, Mann, and Nice — voted against.⁶

In the House, the bill cleared two committees before reaching the floor. The Elections and Ethics Committee passed it on April 7 by a vote of 6 to 1, with Rep. Mickey Dollens, Democrat of Oklahoma City, the lone Nay. The Government Oversight Committee followed on April 15 with a 14 to 4 approval.⁷ On May 7, the full House passed SB 1027 on Third Reading, 69 to 23, and then approved the bill’s emergency clause — the provision that makes a law take effect on signature rather than ninety days later — by a vote of 70 to 21.⁶ The Senate accepted the House’s amendments on May 21, voting 39 to 7 on Fourth Reading.⁶ Governor Kevin Stitt signed SB 1027 into law two days later, on May 23, 2025.¹

The named roll-call lists for every one of these votes are on file at the Oklahoma Legislature’s website. As MoBetta Oklahoma builds out its county pages, the votes of every legislator on SB 1027 will be linked to their district, so any Oklahoman can see how their own elected representative voted on the bill that changed how they can sign a petition.

What the Defenders Say

Sen. Bullard, in announcing the bill’s Senate passage, said SB 1027 “gives a broad cross-section of Oklahomans a voice in what qualifies for the ballot.”⁴ Senate President Pro Tem Lonnie Paxton said the bill “simply reduces the ability of outside interest groups to game the initiative-petition process while ignoring voters across nearly all of Oklahoma.”⁸

That framing is worth taking seriously. There is a real argument that statewide ballot measures should reflect statewide support, and that signature-gathering should not be a service performed by paid out-of-state operatives. SB 1027 attaches itself to that argument in its text and in the press releases that defend it.

What the framing does not explain is the math. A petition campaign that gathers thirty thousand signatures in Oklahoma County — signatures that, before SB 1027, were valid — now sees a fraction of them counted, regardless of the merit of the proposed measure. The same signature, gathered from the same registered voter, by the same Oklahoman, can be valid or invalid depending only on how many other Oklahomans in the same county have already signed. The cap is geographic. The disqualification is mathematical. The result is that an idea Oklahomans support can fail to reach the ballot not because Oklahomans rejected it but because too many of them, in too few counties, agreed too early.

SB 1027 Did Not Arrive Alone

The signature-cap law of 2025 is the third change to Oklahoma’s citizen petition statutes in two years. Two earlier bills, both signed by Governor Stitt in 2024, set the table.

SB 518 (2024), authored by Sen. Julie Daniels and Sen. Lonnie Paxton in the Senate and Rep. Mark Lepak and Rep. Cantrell in the House, was signed into law on April 24, 2024.⁹ The bill imposed a $750 filing fee on every petition (previously there was none), extended the protest window from ten days to twenty, raised the number of voter-registration data points that must match a signature from three to four, and required signers to use their legal first and last names. The House passed SB 518 by a vote of 72 to 25 on April 17, 2024.¹⁰ The bill’s real-world effect arrived in 2025: under the stricter signature-matching rule, nearly fifty-eight thousand signatures submitted in favor of State Question 836 — an initiative to open Oklahoma’s closed primary elections to independent voters — were disqualified.¹¹

HB 1105 (2024) followed five weeks later. Signed by Governor Stitt on May 31, 2024, the bill imposed a separate $1,000 filing fee, refundable only if the petition qualified for the ballot, and extended the protest window further — from ten days to ninety.¹² Codified as Chapter 364 of the 2024 Oklahoma Session Laws, HB 1105 amended Title 34, Section 8, of the Oklahoma Statutes — the same section SB 1027 would amend again the following year.¹³

The legislative record tells the rest. Between 1910 and 2020, Oklahoma amended the initiative petition law seven times in one hundred and ten years.¹³ Between April 2024 and May 2025, the Legislature amended it three more times. Each amendment made the process harder, slower, or more expensive for ordinary Oklahomans to use. None of the three made it easier.

What It Means

Article V, Section 1 of the Oklahoma Constitution is the people’s legislative tool. It exists because the framers of the 1907 Constitution understood something specific: there will be moments when an elected legislature, for whatever reason, does not represent the will of the people who elected it. In those moments, the people retain the right to legislate around it. That is the design.

SB 1027 does not repeal that design. It adjusts the mechanics of signature collection in a way that, defended one provision at a time, looks procedural. Read together, those adjustments make the design harder to use. Each provision can be argued. The stack of provisions cannot.

As of this writing, the Oklahoma Supreme Court is reviewing the constitutionality of SB 1027. On September 15, 2025, Chief Justice Dustin Rowe granted a temporary stay preventing SB 1027 from being enforced against State Question 836, a petition that had been filed before the bill was passed. Oral arguments were heard on November 18, 2025. A ruling is expected.³

The Court’s decision will determine whether SB 1027 stands. But the law’s passage is already a fact. The vote happened. The signatures of the legislators who voted yes are on the record. Their names will be on this site, county by county, in the weeks ahead.

The Oklahoma Constitution opens with a sentence that does not require commentary. All political power is inherent in the people.

Read it again. Then read SB 1027.

You decide.