Before the holiday break, Austin King, Joe Lindstrom and Madison Mayor Dave Cieslewicz held a press conference announcing the minimum-wage campaign had succeeded in receiving 13,136 signatures. This was a mere 283 signatures above the minimum 12,853 required for the referendum to be on the April ballot.
The decision not to submit the signatures and instead force the vote through the City Council is not terribly surprising. In all likelihood, the campaign would not have enough legitimate signatures if the petitions were to be scrutinized signature by signature. Every petition drive brings in duplicate signatures as well as signatures from people who do not live within the necessary boundaries. Based on the number of signatures submitted, the campaign would have needed a 98 percent legitimacy rate to qualify for a referendum. This rate is unheard of and the referendum would have been dead on arrival.
Even if we were to momentarily grant the fact that enough of the signatures were legitimate, a decision against holding the referendum and representing those signatures as support is also wrong.
The campaign was intended to put the decision in the hands of voters. With this in mind, one cannot safely assume those who signed the petition supported the referendum. The purpose of the petition was to garner support for putting the issue on the ballot, an important distinction that Cieslewicz, Lindstrom and King conveniently forget.
Mayor Cieslewicz was quoted in the Wisconsin State Journal as saying, “It’s a better process,” referring to the new strategy of forcing a 50 percent hike in the minimum-wage through City Council by a simple majority vote.
We are disappointed to see the minimum wage campaign will not simply go through the referendum channel as organizers told the voters it would. If the campaign has the signatures, so be it. Let’s have a full vote on ballots available to all of Madison. If the signatures are not there, then the people have indicated they aren’t interested in voting on such a drastic minimum-wage increase, and the campaign should end.
At the absolute best, the campaign was able to convince 6.3 percent of Madison residents we should have a vote on the minimum-wage issue — it did not convince them to actually support a minimum-wage hike. For a measure of such drastic economic and social importance, we believe the decision should be decided at the hands of the people.