BY CASSIE STRAUSS

SALEM-The House approved the creation of a project Monday morning to further help voters understand initiative measures on the ballot.

The project, called the Citizen’s Initiative Review (CIR), would consist of 24 members chosen to accurately reflect Oregon’s demographics. The citizens pick at least one measure on the ballot. After looking at fiscal impact, availability of needed funding, the affect on the Oregon Constitution, and any other important information, the citizens create a statement to be included in the voters’ pamphlets distributed before each election.

Representative Nancy Nathanson, D-Eugene, carried the bill on the House floor, calling it an alternative to the “sound bites” voters currently receive on initiative measures. According to Nathanson, the statements released by the CIR would be “one extra source of information—impartial, unbiased, by citizens.”

But not all members saw the project as beneficial.

The sole dissenter in the House, Representative Tim Freeman (R-Roseburg) told his colleagues that he feared it would create “super citizens” to research and decide on the bill and that he opposed government intervention in the initiative process. Traditionally, this process is spearheaded and conducted by private citizens.

Elliot Shuford, co-director of Healthy Democracy Oregon which led the effort to support the project, responded, “We think voters are the exact group who should be doing an evaluation for their peers.”

“Ultimately, it is up to voters to sort through and decide how they want to vote anyway,” he said.

Nathanson told Oregon Capitol News that she believes it is often difficult for voters to do their own research amidst the barrage of information from both sides of the measures.

“Many people, including myself, after reading the information, found out one or more facts that they hadn’t been aware of,” she said.

“When you have regular voters researching and questioning panelists and experts in the field able to ask and probe over a number of days, that’s a lot more time than any of us would have as a regular voter to do that kind of research on our own.”

The CIR was originally proposed in 2009 by Healthy Democracy Oregon after a 2008 field test, in which the entire process was tested without statements being published, yielded positive results. Healthy Democracy is an organization “committed to strengthening the integrity of the ballot initiative process,” according to their website. The subsequent 2009 legislation passed, and in 2010 a pilot program of the CIR reviewed Measures 73 and 74.

The reviews produced by the CIR were then reviewed by John Gastil, a professor with the University of Washington’s Department of Communication. In a study funded by the National Science Foundation, he reported that the citizen panels “conducted a rigorous analysis” and that voters spent more time reading through the citizen’s statement than the other information provided in the voters’ pamphlets.

In his opposition, Freeman also questioned the creation of a new state agency for the project. Nathanson rebutted that the review would not be publicly funded, but rather financed by donations.

Shuford stated that there are already over 600 Oregonians who funded the pilot program, with grants lined up to fund the CIR in the future, and a list of expected donors.

Moreover, the organization would be designated as a state agency only so its collection of private funds—essentially, donations—can be monitored. On years when there are not sufficient funds, the program will be scaled back comparably, mostly by reviewing fewer measures. The first year, the CIR will be loaned $75,000, which will be reimbursed in 2012.

Nathanson succinctly summed up the funding in her own sound bite: “No funding, no review.”

The bill now moves to the Senate before it can be approved by the governor.