07/25/2026
Thank you, Burt for continuing to cover this issue!
3 points we want to make sure people take away from this interview, and this issue:
1) The attorney general claims he wishes we could have our grand jury. We can. We should have it. If he wanted that he could order the grand jury investigation himself and we wouldn’t be arguing about signature counts.
2) The Attorney General casually mentions a strictly prohibited phone call between himself and the judge that resulted in our grand jury petition being overturned. THOUSANDS of Payne County Residents were stripped of their right to due process and continue to be so. If he is so comfortable admitting this publicly, how common is it for him to engage in ex Parte communication?
if we followed the Attorney Generals calculation on signature count collection we have to construe (or mash up) multiple sections of the constitution to come up with that percentage.
As the Attorney General said, “we either care about the rule of law or we don’t,” so we should follow the sequence the constitution outlines:
1. Determine Payne County’s proportion of the statewide vote.
2. Double that ratio, as expressly required by Article V, Section 5.
3. Apply the doubled ratio to the number of qualified electors in Payne County.
4. Confirm that the resulting number falls within Article II, Section 18’s minimum of 500 and maximum of 5,000.
Using the Attorney General’s calculation, Payne County petitioners would have to obtain signatures from approximately 15.7% of those who voted for governor in 2022, while Tulsa County would effectively need signatures from about 2.6% and Oklahoma County about 2.0% because of the Constitution’s 5,000-signature cap. Mathematically, that places a substantially greater signature burden on Payne County than on the state’s two largest counties.
Does the attorney general really believe the founders of our constitution wrote it in a way that made access to government oversight almost impossible for our rural communities?