Petition Circulators

The most prominent member of the Oklahoma Three, now freed, speaks out on the experience of being charged for the crime of trying to qualify an initiative for the ballot. Via This Is Common Sense.

Both the outgoing governor, U.S. Homeland Security Secretary-nominee Janet Napolitano, and her successor, Jan Brewer, have called for major reform of the state's initiative process. So has the Arizona Republic, in this recent editorial.  It's hard to blame them. Arizona saw perhaps unprecedented signature fraud last year. A typical validity rate for signatures collected in an initiative campaign is 70 percent. But multiple measures last year had validity rates of less than 50 percent. That's strong evidence of institutional, across-the-board fraud.

A state legislator in Missouri, Mike Parson, is proposiing two major changes in the signature gathering game. 1. Requiring all signature gatherers to register with the state. 2. Barring petition circulators from being paid per signature. Instead, they would have to be paid by the hour.

It's not clear that Parson's first proposal is legal. Petitioning the government is an essential part of First Amendment freedoms, and any law to restrict petition circulators is unlikely to survive the courts. The second idea is not legally suspect, but it would have the effect of reducing access to the ballot. The per-signature system of payment produces far more signatures, more efficiently, than any other system.

Ben Austin had the backing of LA's rulers. But he had the wrong signatures. Capitol Weekly has the story.

UPDATE: The consultant Austin says he hired says she was never in fact hired by Austin. Confused? The explanation is here.

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.