After learning he had used an incorrect formula to determine signature sufficiency, Oklahoma County District Judge Richard Ogden issued an order Monday canceling his prior order to convene a grand jury in Payne County. By his revised determination that the petition failed to achieve the necessary number of signatures, Ogden’s new order could be a fatal setback for the grand jury petition seeking a sweeping investigation into former District Attorney Laura Thomas while alleging a conspiracy involving the state’s child services division.
“It is therefore ordered, adjudged and decreed that petitioners failed to obtain a sufficient number of valid signatures within 45 days as required by [Title 38, Section 130]; therefore the petition is null and void as prescribed,” Ogden wrote Monday. “It is further ordered, adjudged and decreed that proceedings regarding said grand jury as previously ordered by this court including its empanelment are stricken and vacated.”
Like an earlier version of the petition filed in 2025, the 2026 Payne County petition alleges Thomas “suppressed evidence” of wrongdoing by the Oklahoma Department of Human Services, and it implies a conspiracy of “publicly elected officials,” attorneys, court officials, law enforcement and other actors systematically committing crimes against children and families across the state. The 2026 petition implies multiple officials are part of the alleged scheme, including Thomas, former House Speaker Charles McCall, now-Speaker Kyle Hilbert (R-Bristow), Oklahoma County District Judge Natalie Mai, Attorney General Gentner Drummond, justices of the Oklahoma Supreme Court and the staff with the Oklahoma Council on Judicial Complaints.
Ogden’s initial order only authorized a grand jury investigation into Thomas’ conduct and did not include the laundry list of state officials from the original petition.
Citizen petitions for grand jury petitions involve many lawyers’ least favorite subject: math. For a grand jury petition to be successful, “the correct calculation of the number of signatures required to empanel a grand jury is 16 percent of the number of votes cast in the county at the last general election for governor, with the minimum number of signatures required being 500 and the maximum required being 5,000,” according to the 2024 Oklahoma Supreme Court decision in Muskogee County Board of Commissioners v. King. (Described mathematically, the number of signatures required is equal to 0.16 x N, where N is the number of votes in the county during last general election.)
The 2022 gubernatorial general election saw 21,778 registered voters participate in Payne County, meaning a successful grand jury petition in Payne County needs at least 3,484 signatures to be successful. The grand jury petition at hand featured the submission of 2,452 valid signatures.
In initially ordering a grand jury to be empaneled, Ogden appears to have adopted the mathematical formula suggested by the group seeking the petition, Parents for Payne County. In its brief, the organization argues the proper formula for a grand jury petition signature requirement takes the number of voters who voted in the last gubernatorial election in the county and divides it by the total number of votes statewide. Then, that ratio would be doubled before being multiplied by the number of county votes cast in the last gubernatorial election.
That formula ends up being: ((M/N) x 2) x M, where M is the number of votes in the county during last general election and N is the total number of votes in the state during the last general election. Using that formula, the required number of signatures for Payne County would be 821, based on numbers from the Payne County Election Board. Because Parents for Payne County used the incorrect values for both M and N in their brief, they argued the required number of signatures for their petition was 850. Ogden appears to have applied a similar formula, but he found the required number of signatures to be 828.
Regardless of how the Parents for Payne County math works out, the petition and Ogden’s initial review of it appeared to miss the standard set by the Oklahoma Supreme Court entirely.
Ogden did not respond to a request for comment Monday.
Drummond, OCJC challenged math
The Friday after Ogden’s initial order, both Drummond and the OCJC filed documents informing Ogden he had used the incorrect formula. The OCJC brief was the most direct and requested Ogden either modify his prior order to correct the formula or stay his order for a grand jury pending appeal.
In its 41-page filing, OCJC also admonished Parents for Payne County, whom the agency characterized as “a group of supporters of Rep. Justin Humphrey” (R-Lane), for not disclosing the correct formula to Ogden. OCJC accused the group of knowingly misleading Ogden because the group’s “previous petition based on virtually the same factual allegations” was deemed not to have reached the proper signature threshold by former District Court Judge Jason Reese.
“Proponents also should have revealed the existence of the King case to the court. The proponents knew or should have known about the BOCC of Muskogee County v. King. It was cited in Judge Reese’s order back in 2025,” attorney Robert McCampbell wrote. “This inaccurate statement to the court alone is grounds to modify the June 23 order.”
Drummond’s filing was much shorter and simply pointed Ogden to the controlling case at issue.
“The Oklahoma Constitution’s provisions regarding the required number of signatures to empanel a county grand jury are not models of clarity. However, the Oklahoma Supreme Court in Board of County Commissioners of Muskogee County v. King reconciled the relevant provisions of the Oklahoma Constitution and clarified the number of signatures required to impanel a county grand jury,” wrote Assistant Attorney General Jimmy Harmon. “In response to this court’s order, the Payne County Election Board certified that 21,778 votes were cast in the 2022 general election in Payne County. Multiplying this number of votes by the 16 percent formula determined by Muskogee County v. King results in the number of signatures required to impanel a grand jury in Payne County being 3,484.”
Reese rejected the prior Payne County grand jury petition in November for failing to obtain enough signatures.
“As to the signature count calculation, the court noted to the parties that Oklahoma law provides for the requisite number of signatures to be sixteen percent of the total number of votes cast for governor in the county in the most recent election,” Reese wrote. “The total votes cast for governor in Payne County in the 2022 election was 22,138. Sixteen percent of that number is 3,542.”
Highlighting the confusion over the exact number of signatures needed, Reese used the number of votes from the Oklahoma State Election Board website for his calculations, which differ slightly from the official numbers from the Payne County Election Board.
