Guidelines around what to do with signatures found to be fraudulent, or duplicates, or forged.
Even less clear in most state laws is what latitude or ability elections officials have to address fraud once they have determined that it exists in petitions. Often, we see fraud very clearly, but the laws are unclear about what steps can be taken to disallow signatures. In this regard, more specificity in the law is better. For example:
If there is a pattern of fraud in a petitioner's body of work, it's important to know what the remedy is. In some states, the lack of clarity does not even allow for the individual signature to be removed. In others, the individual signature is all that can be removed. For example, in Oklahoma, a court referee issues a ruling on challenges to each individual signature, usually from a pool of 300,000 submitted.
A stronger approach is to specify a related sample of signatures that can be removed. This would obviously depend upon the signature requirements in the state- they range between roughly 16,000 (South Dakota) and 611,000 (Florida). So instead of removing one signature for every fraudulent entry (1:1), it would be more like removing twenty signatures for every fraudulent signature (20:1). This formula should take into account the size of the required signature submission (less than 50,000 or more than 200,000 are probably going to require different samples) but it should stipulate that a sample will be used to disallow fraud.
An even stronger approach is to allow a petitioner's whole body of work to be disallowed if it is clear that there is a pattern of fraud. This can demand a stronger threshold of evidence, but it is one of the strongest approaches to rooting out fraud in petitions. In Oregon, it is possible to disallow a petitioner's entire body of work on a petition if they have been convicted of fraud. It may be worth relaxing that standard and allowing the Secretary of State some latitude in removing signatures if a petitioner is charged with fraud, for example. This obviously affects the signature counts.
