Sarah Gorman of Burke Williams and Sorenson passes along this order issued by a federal district court on Friday in Chinchay v. Verjil. The court there held, under Padilla v. Lever, that section 203 applies to initiative petitions but not to referendum petitions. What’s the difference? According to the district court:

Most critically, aside from generally regulating the format, the state is not involved in any way with referendum petitions prior to their circulation for signature, in contrast to both recall and initiative petitions….Moreover, the court finds that the wholesale application of the Ninth Circuit’s reasoning in Padilla to referenda is also problematic due to two important differences between referenda and initiatives or recalls—namely the thirty day time limit and the often sizable amount of materials that must be included with the referendum petition.

The court also considers whether Padilla applies retroactively, and I think gets the law wrong. The court is right that the Supreme Court in Harper v. Virginia Board of Taxation requires retroactivity of statutes to all whose cases are pending when the court has applied an interpretation retroactively to the parties before it. But in Padilla, that did not happen: the interpretation was not applied to the recall election challenged in Padilla, which took place years before the court actually decided Padilla.
In other Padilla-relate news, Allison Hayward links to this article explaining that some officials believe that Monterey county cannot post campaign finance disclosure forms on a county website unless they are translated into Spanish. Amazing!