Nevada appears on its way to adopt a distribution requirement for petition circulators: to qualify an initiative, signatures would have to gather a minimum number of signatures in all four of the state's Congressional districts. (This represents a change from earlier versions of the bill, which would have required signatures from all 42 Assembly districts).

I'm torn on the question of distribution requirements. In principle, it's fair to require that signatures be gathered across the state -- a statewide measure should be truly statewide. In California, which doesn't have a signature requirement, the vast bulk of signatures come from the south. And the percentage of signatures collected in San Diego County, the hotbed of direct democracy in the state, far surpasses the percentage of state voters who live in that county.

But distribution requirements also add significantly to the cost of petition drives. And when signature gathering becomes more expensive, the initiative process can only be used by wealthy individuals and interest groups. 

A federal judge ruled Monday that a new Nevada rule applying signature gathering requirements to all counties was unconstitutional. The distribution requirement said that it wasn't enough to simply get signatures from 10 percent of all voters in the state. Ballot measure sponsors needed 10 percent of voters in each county as well. The rule was one reason behind the widespread failure of initiatives to qualify for the ballot in Nevada this year.