Petition Circulators

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.

In a quick morning canvas of signature gatherers and local coordinators in California, none of the half-dozen people I checked with around the state has been hired to do the Arnold recall as yet. This is the slow season for the signature gathering game. Many of California's gatherers are working on local initiative or referendum petitions -- there's a significant one in Stockton, and several in Southern California -- or are out of state. The good news for supporters of recalling Arnold is that it wouldn't be hard to hire signature gatherers fast, and with little else on the street, the price wouldn't be particularly high.

The latest victim of Arizona's signature gathering mess is Ward Connerly's anti-affirmative action initiative there. Connerly's effort there submitted a number of signatures well over the minimum required for qualification, but the state and counties found so many signatures to be invalid that it has been struck from the November ballot. Connerly is telling the Arizona press that he's not giving up--he's going to show the signatures are valid.

This is the third of five states in which Connerly's organization sponsored anti-affirmative action measures but failed to qualify them for the ballot. In each state, Connerly and his organization have blamed others -- state officials, opponents doing blocking campaigns, or even state laws. But it may be time to regroup and develop a better approach to signature gathering. Connerly is 2 for 5 this year. Batting .400 is good in baseball, but embarssing bad when you've got the funding and are qualifying measures for the ballot. One wonders when Connerly's financial backers will begin to complain that he is wasting their money.

The Arizona Daily Star offers up a long editorial on the need to fix the state's initiative process. It's timely. Three measures were knocked off the ballot because of invalid signatures and two others made the ballot despite questions about their signatures. What to do?

The Star offers two ideas, one bad and one good. The first involves getting rid of paid signature gatherers. The problem: volunteer drives are less efficient and more expensive, on a per-signature basis. That's why there hasn't been a successful volunteer petition drive for a statewide measure in California since 1982. True professional petition circulators are a safeguard against fraud. Eliminating them would create more problems than it solves.

The second idea is a better one: loosening the deadline. Arizona has a fairly tight deadline for getting signatures and qualifying for the ballot -- four months. That makes signature gathering more expensive and creates an incentive for fraud. If you want true grass roots signature gathering, the deadline should be lifted entirely. (On this second point, the Tuscon Citizen agrees).

I'd also like to see Internet signature gathering with security measures that allow for independent verification.

Here is a Sacramento Bee item on an independent legislative candidate who got enough sigs -- some 21,000 to qualify for the ballot. This is rare (Former Long Beach Mayor Beverly O'Neill is one of a handful of politicians to make the ballot as a write-in in a significant election).

What's most interesting is what the candidate, Jim Fitzgerald, seems to have discovered during the process: paid signature gathering is effecitvely cheaper and more efficient. Fitzgerald started off with a volunteer effort to get the signatures, but, as those involved in the signature gathering game know, volunteer signature work is far more costly on a per-signature basis than a paid signature efffort. Fitzgerald went to a temp agency, according to the Sacramento Bee, and spent $30,000 to get the sigs. That's not bad by the way -- about $1.30 a signature. $2 a sig has become the default cost in many California signature gathering efforts.

In blockbuster democracy, there are always invalid signatures. People don't sign their own names. Forgery by gatherers can be a problem. Sometimes, people's signatures change over time, and no longer match registration cards filed decades ago. Or people mistakenly leave out part of their address, or sign on a petition from the wrong county. Some problems are to be expected. When initiative petition signatures are checked, about 70 percent of signatures will prove to be valid -- if the signature gathering operation was well run.

But in Arizona, the signature gathering efforts for multiple measures appear to have failed to meet that standard. According to the Arizona Republic, three measures appear to be in trouble. Two of them, one involving real estate transfers and another involving conservation, appear to have fallen short. A third, a transportation initiative, had so few valid signatures that it has failed to make the ballot. In random sampling, an estimated 42 percent of the signatures were invalid, suggesting that the people handling the gathering failed to do their job. Arizona's Secretary of State said that this was "among the largest overall invalid rates that I can recall ever seeing from a citizens initiative drive.” The initiative won't be on the ballot.

In my summer column on Internet signature gathering, I missed this interesting June 2008 report commissioned by the Center for Governmental Studies on the very same subject. It notes there are real problems with such gathering, but also notes that there is a real risk of forgery under the current signature regime.

After a busy spring and summer, signature gathering across the country is finally reaching its 2008 conclusion. The final deadlines for turning in signatures for November ballot initiatives are this week in three states: Colorado (August 4), North Dakota (August 5), and Ohio (August 6). Deadlines in all the other states have already passed. So  I'm heading to a small town in rural Wisconsin (your blogger's Cheesehead in-laws have a bug-infested family cottage on a lake) for a week to catch up on sleep (you may have noticed a few more mental hiccups than usual on the blog lately) and do some writing. I plan to stay away from email and the Internet until Aug. 11. But before I go, I wanted to advance an idea: permitting voters to sign initiative petitions on-line.

In some states, there's already limited circulation by Internet. If a petition is formatted right, it can be emailed to voters, who print it out, sign it and send it in. That's fine, but I'd like to go further, permitting voters to add their names to ballot initiative petitions as they now do to other on-line petitions. For security's sake, the voters would have to provide more than just their real name. They'd have to give an address, an email, and a phone number that matches the number on their voter registration--a phone number where they could be reached to verify that their signature is authentic. 

John Fund writes in the Wall Street Journal that the left is waging a war on direct democracy by attempting to obstruct gatherers for conservative initiatives. There's some truth in the argument, but it goes too far. Blocking campaigns of the type Fund describes have long been part of the initiative game. Experience and academic studies show they're ineffective. And a lack of organization and money in the Connerly camp is a big part of the reason for the failure of the anti-affirmative action measures.

The real war against direct democracy is a bipartisan one, and it's being waged by elected officials who, in the name of "cleaning up" signature gathering, change the law to make it harder to gather signatures. These laws usually restrict "out of state" gatherers (petition circulators are a traveling army, so almost everyone who knows how to do this is at some level "out of state") or limit the time to gather sigantures (a true liberal, democratic form would extend or even lift deadlines to permit community groups or true grasroots organizations to gather signatures over the period of a year or more).

The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit has struck down Arizona's residency requirement for signature gatherers as unconstitutional. It's not a surprise--residency requirements have died judicial deaths elsewhere, most notably in Colorado -- but it's still a big victory for professional petition circulators.

The case was brought by Ralph Nader and had nothing to do with ballot initiatives. Nader, in his efforts to get on the 2004 Arizona ballot as a presidential candidate, was frustrated by the state's rules requiring residency by those gathering signatures and requiring candidates to submit their qualifying signatures 90 days before the election. But the ruling applies to signature gatherers whether they are working for candidates or ballot initiatives. So the greatest impact of the decision will be on the blockbuster democracy business. Most likely, this decision will reduce the cost of qualifying a measure for the ballot. An army of 10,000 California signature gatherers lives next door to Arizona. Now they will be able to collect signatures there without having to move there and register to vote. The full decision is here.