Ballot fraud is what happens when voters are lied to and deceived into signing petition sheets, and when petition gatherers use an array of tactics, such as forgery, to falsely qualify an initiative onto the ballot.
Where is ballot initiative signature fraud happening?
Starting in 2004, the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center (BISC) began receiving numerous complaints across the states about abuses in signature gathering. Over the last three years, in particular, there has been a dramatic jump in the use of signature fraud all across the country to qualify ballot initiatives. The problem has gone from an unfortunate byproduct of the process to the standard operating procedure of the leading petition firms. As the use of deceptive signature gathering practices has grown, BISC has increasingly focused its efforts on exposing the different methods that petitioners use to fool voters and break state laws, and the funders behind the efforts. Our work in exposing the multi-state misdeeds of National Voter Outreach in 2006 led to the disqualification of a number of the organization's petitions and their clients' initiatives stripped from the ballot.
Click here to watch about fraudulent signature gathering practices and what you can do to help keep the system honest.
BISC has witnessed and helped shape hundreds of ballot measure campaigns in over 30 states across the country. In 2006 BISC helped expose the massive and coordinated effort to fraudulently qualify the Grover Norquist-spawned (and Howard Rich-funded) Taxpayer Bill of Rights (TABOR) ballot measure in several states. Due to fraud, disorganization in petitioning and other legal and political issues associated with this drive, six TABOR measures were actually removed from the ballot.
The level of fraud perpetrated by the circulators of TABOR had never been witnessed before and was so extreme it prompted at least ten states to push for legislation to shore up gaps in their initiative laws that allow fraud to go unnoticed. To quote Montana judge Dirk Sandefur, "the signature gathering process for CI-97, CI-98, and I-154 was permeated by a pervasive and general pattern and practice of deceit, fraud, and procedural non-compliance."
What ballot initiatives are ripe for abuse?
Over the last two years, BISC has dug deep into the underbelly of signature petitioning and we've learned that fraud in ballot measure signature gathering is often par for the course.
Some of the largest and most well used signature firms have been operating for almost a decade under various allegations of fraud and have circulated initiative petitions in a majority of states that allow the initiative process.
Their strategy is simple.
- First the firms will move into a state and hire subcontractors (whom the firms maintain little to no oversight of) to run the signature gathering process.
- Then these subcontractors hire nomadic signature gatherers that migrate from one state to another chasing whichever petitions are paying the biggest rate per signature.
- The mercenaries flood a state, at best ignorant of the state's laws governing signature collection, or at worse, actively choose to ignore those laws.
- Gatherers are paid by the signature so they have every reason to cheat to boost those numbers.
- These migrant signature gathers routinely use false names or addresses and are almost impossible to track once they leave the state.
- Many circulators have been discovered to have prior identity theft and sexual predatory convictions.
- The most popular and well-used firms have been a major player in the culture of deceit for years.
Why should we care about fraud?
Particularly in an age when identify theft and corruption are big public concerns, voters need the full story so they can avoid falling victim to these deceptive practices by some of the worst actors in American politics today. BISC has found that few right-wing ballot initiatives qualify without some level of signature fraud. These fraud merchants go back to the same firms repeatedly, and without consistent laws to prosecute for fraud, their bad faith efforts abuse the system.
Claimed the CEO of one such firm, on responsibility to a healthy democracy, "It is not my place to tell the secretary of state what is a good signature and what isn't. It is only my place to make sure that I have enough signatures to qualify the initiative."
The record of misdeeds by these signature gathering firms in the petition process has recently crippled so many right-wing ballot efforts that it seems almost designed to hurt their clients' efforts.
One of the main components of our work is to advocate for an open and honest ballot initiative process. We strongly believe that all ballot measures campaigns-whether sponsored by conservative or progressive organizations, or petitioned through paid or volunteer signature gathering-should be required to play by the rules.
