The Oregon ballot measure that would strip legal protection from most hunting and fishing has failed its first signature verification. It is not dead yet.
IP 28, styled by its backers as the PEACE Act, filed 142,784 signatures with the Oregon Secretary of State on July 2. Reaching the November 2026 ballot requires 117,173 valid ones, which means roughly 82 percent of what was submitted has to survive checking. The Elections Division drew a random sample of 1,000. Of those, 804 verified, a rate of 80.4 percent.
"I can confirm that IP 28 did not qualify for the ballot based on the first sample of signatures," said Connor Radnovich, a spokesman for the Oregon Secretary of State's office.
That is a first sample, not a verdict. Under Oregon's process, a shortfall at this stage triggers a second and larger check rather than an outright rejection.
"The signature verification team has moved on to the second, larger sample," Radnovich said.
The two samples combined must cover at least 5 percent of the signatures submitted, and the verification deadline is August 2. A 1.6-point miss on a sample of 1,000 is thin evidence in either direction, and a bigger sample can move the rate up as easily as down. What the campaign does not have is margin to give back.
The measure would remove the exemptions that currently shield hunting, fishing, trapping and certain animal husbandry practices from Oregon's animal cruelty statutes. Its opponents have spent months arguing that the practical damage would land less on individual anglers than on the agency that manages the state's fish.
"Anglers and hunters in Oregon are responsible, in large part, for funding the state's conservation mission," said Trey Carskadon, vice president of the Northwest Sportfishing Industry Association.
"Passage of IP 28 would defund ODFW and severely cripple the agency's ability to deliver the necessary conservation measures," Carskadon said.
That funding argument has given the opposition a broader coalition than a hunting-rights fight would normally attract. Licence sales and federal excise taxes on tackle and ammunition underwrite a large share of the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife's budget, including habitat work and hatchery operations that anglers who never buy a hunting tag still rely on.
The campaign behind IP 28 has said little publicly since the sample result. Chief petitioner David Michelson has not issued a statement addressing the shortfall, and the Yes on IP28 site carried no response to the first-sample failure at the time of writing. Reporting on the result has so far been one-sided by default rather than by design.
For anglers watching from outside Oregon, the mechanics matter more than the rhetoric. Initiative campaigns routinely submit a cushion of signatures precisely because a meaningful share always fails verification through duplicates, unregistered signers and mismatched signatures. IP 28's cushion was about 25,000, and the first sample suggests it may not be enough.
The Elections Division has until August 2 to finish. Until then, a measure that would rewrite what is legal to do with a rod in Oregon sits roughly two percentage points from the ballot.
