by Paul Jacob

Sometimes Missouri Secretary of State Robin Carnahan administers elections and sometimes she seems hell-bent on preventing them from ever taking place.

She's a Democrat, but does she like democracy? Well, she liked it fine when she found new ways to count spoiled ballots in a local election, allowing a fellow Democrat to win a recount by a single vote.

But when it comes to citizen initiatives with which she disagrees, she doesn't care to hear from the voters at all.

She tried to derail a private property rights measure by moving the long-set petition deadline up two days . . . with only weeks left, and at extra taxpayer expense. Then, when activists turned in over 200,000 voter signatures nonetheless, Carnahan had her office refuse to count the petitions.

Well-connected opponents of the measure challenged the ballot title, which her office wrote. With only 48 hours left before the deadline for petitions to be turned in, she gave proponents a new ballot title and told them that only signatures gathered in these last hours would be counted.

Carnahan also argues that she shouldn't have to count the petitions because 4 percent of the pages lack page numbers. In the past her office handled this common problem without trouble. Not now.

This is official Show-Me state opposition to the rights of the people to participate in the initiative process. Robin Carnahan is a Reverse Robin Hood, destroying democracy in order to protect the powerful.

Paul Jacob's "Common Sense" is published by Americans for Limited Government. Their website can be visited at www.limitedgov.org.