Oklahoma State Ballot Questions

Oklahoma Policy Institute has an excellent page explaining the 2012 Oklahoma State Questions. This page has links to further information about each ballot measure. I especially like their explanation of the many flaws of SQ 759. Here's one example:

Extensive research on affirmative action has so far uncovered no evidence of a new regime of ‘reverse racism.’ In fact, White women have benefited enormously. In the thirty years following the onset of equal opportunity, White women reached their proportionate share in management occupations and more than tripled their rate of college completion.

Equal opportunity initiatives do not advance women and minorities over Whites and men; they privilege fair and equal access for all groups. A scholarly analysis of thousands of ‘reverse discrimination’ cases in federal courts in the mid-1990s found that almost all of them lacked legal merit. Most of these cases failed because disappointed applicants erroneously believed that a woman or minority got the job based on race or sex, not because their qualifications were superior to their own.

In other words, the not-so-subtle subtext of SQ 759--and other efforts against affirmative action--is the unfounded belief that if someone besides a white guy succeeds, it must be because of "reverse discrimination."

But what about quotas? Aren't those a bad idea? The answer is, quotas have been illegal in Oklahoma since the 1980s:

Many people mistakenly believe that affirmative action is a quota system, where people are hired based on a ‘count’ of minorities that must be selected. Public hiring quotas and contract preferences have been illegal in Oklahoma since the early 1980s. The State Regents for Higher Education have never used minority admissions quotas. The myth is so pervasive, even several legislators think that SQ 759 would eliminate quotas.

What is affirmative action? In Oklahoma, state agencies report annually on the demographic make-up of their workforce, and are encouraged to improve outreach during the hiring process among demographics they find poorly represented. The state Office of Personnel Management says affirmative action involves simply, “identifying departments in which the number of women or ethnic minorities is below that for the general workforce, then recruiting qualified candidates to address the situation.”

I'm voting no on State Question 759.