Oklahoma City, Oklahoma: State Supreme Court Voids Law That Capped Petition Signatures by County

The Oklahoma Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down a 2025 law that limited how Oklahomans can put questions on the statewide ballot. In a 5 to 4 decision in McVay v. Lepak, 2026 OK 81, the justices declared Senate Bill 1027 unconstitutional and void in its entirety. The ruling restores the petition rules that were in place before the law took effect.

What the law tried to do

Senate Bill 1027 took effect on May 23, 2025. It capped how many signatures a petition campaign could count from any one county, at 11.5 percent of that county's vote total in the last governor's race for a statutory petition and 20.8 percent for a constitutional amendment. It required petition circulators to be registered Oklahoma voters, banned money from out of state, banned paying circulators per signature, and gave the secretary of state new power over the gist, the short summary printed at the top of every petition.

Campaigns usually gather most of their signatures near Oklahoma City and Tulsa, where the people are. The caps forced campaigns to chase signatures in far-flung counties with only a few thousand residents, and once a county hit its cap, no one else who lived there could sign.

Why the court struck it down

The majority, in an opinion by Justice Noma Gurich, treated petition circulation as core political speech under the First Amendment. The court used Harmon County, in the far southwest corner of the state, to show what the caps did in practice. Harmon County has 1,378 registered voters, and the court wrote that only 75 of them would have been allowed to sign a statutory petition. The other 1,303 would have been turned away.

"Never before have legal Oklahoma voters been outright prohibited from signing an initiative or referendum petition," the court wrote. "In short, this act severely disenfranchises voters in all 77 counties."

The court also struck down the gist rules, saying the secretary of state's power to reject summary language "allows the government to commandeer political speech at a critical juncture of advocacy." The bans on per-signature pay and on out-of-state contributions fell on the same free speech grounds. The four dissenting justices, Chief Justice Dustin Rowe, Vice Chief Justice Dana Kuehn, Justice John Kane IV and Special Justice Jim Huber, generally supported keeping the signature cap but agreed with other parts of the result.

What happens now

Four Oklahoma voters brought the case: Craig McVay, Amy Cerato, Kenneth Setter of Tulsa County and Tony Stobbe of Edmond. They filed their challenges on June 12, 2025, weeks after the law took effect. Because an amending law that is void is treated as if it was never passed, the petition rules from before Senate Bill 1027 are back in full force. The state can ask the court to reconsider, and a petition for rehearing is due within ten days of the filing, a window that closes around November 20.

In a separate decision, the court ruled that Senate Bill 1027 would not apply to State Question 836, the open primaries petition that was filed before the law passed. Senate Democratic Leader Julia Kirt of Oklahoma City welcomed Tuesday's ruling. "This ruling puts power back where it belongs, with the people," she said.