More Attorney Lechner in the News

Saturday, March 4, 2006
Pay to get signatures on petitions questioned
By PAUL CARRIER, Portland Press Herald Writer
Copyright © 2006 Blethen Maine Newspapers Inc.

AUGUSTA — Maine may move to ban the practice of paying petition circulators for each signature they get in a referendum campaign because the practice could encourage forgery, Secretary of State Matthew Dunlap said Friday. Democratic state Sen. Bill Diamond of Windham, who once held Dunlap's job, agreed, saying the current setup "only entices crime" by giving petitioners a financial incentive to maximize signatures. But referendum activists said Friday that the system works just fine the way it is, so there is no need to fix it.

The debate surfaced after supporters of a Washington County gambling plan acknowledged that one of the workers who circulated petitions for them forged signatures. Dunlap ruled this week that organizers of that campaign, which sought a referendum to legalize slot machines in Washington County, failed to collect enough valid signatures to force a public vote on the issue.
He found that 12,985 of the more than 60,000 signatures submitted by referendum organizers were invalid. The reasons included the fact that thousands of those who signed were not registered voters, and thousands of signatures were duplicates.

It is not uncommon for petition signatures to be rejected for such reasons, which can be attributed to human error rather than fraud. But in addition to rejecting those 12,985 signatures, Dunlap wrote that the Office of the Attorney General is investigating "allegations of irregularities in the gathering of (other) signatures," including forgery.

Steven Lechner, the lawyer for the group pushing for a referendum, said Friday that city and town clerks, who have to review petition signatures before they are submitted to the state, found "irregularities" in about 1,000 signatures collected by one worker, who has not been publicly identified.

Lechner said municipal officials alerted the campaign, which notified Dunlap's office and fired the worker, who had been paid on a per-signature basis.

Fred Moore, the Passamaquoddy Tribe's representative to the Legislature and a leader of the referendum campaign, said organizers used a combination of paid circulators and volunteers to collect signatures. He said the paid workers got about $2 to $2.50 per name.

State officials say there are no statistics on how many referendum campaigns rely on petition workers paid by the signature. But Deputy Secretary of State Julie Flynn said the practice is common and she suspects that most Maine referendums employ at least some workers who are paid that way.

This year, for example, campaigns for referendums on a water tax, government spending caps and gambling all used some workers who were paid by the signature, according to organizers of each campaign. The gambling and water-tax campaigns failed to win spots on the ballot. The push for a so-called taxpayer bill of rights met the signature threshold, though that victory is being challenged in court.

The Maine Legislature outlawed per-signature payments in 1994, but a U.S. District Court threw out the ban in 1999 and such payments have been legal here ever since. Court rulings on the issue have been mixed, however. The courts have upheld bans in North Dakota and Oregon while rejecting them in Maine and Washington state, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

All told, four of the 24 states that allow citizen-initiated referendums have laws on the books that prohibit paying petitioners by the signature, according to NCSL. The four states with bans that have not been challenged in court or that have survived legal challenges are Mississippi, North Dakota, Oregon and Wyoming.

Based on what happened in the gambling campaign, Dunlap said Friday, it would be wise for the Legislature to take another look at banning per-signature payments once again. If referendum campaigns that need to get a lot of signatures quickly pay workers for each one, Dunlap said, "it creates a situation that people sometimes will take risks." Opponents of per-signature payments say it would be safer to pay workers by the hour, or make them salaried employees.

That "would discourage some rabid signature gatherers from being too aggressive," said Edith Leary of Winthrop, who has worked against several referendums that made it to the ballot in recent years.

But Mary Adams of Garland, the leader of the campaign for the taxpayer bill of rights, said her camp needed per-signature workers to put it over the top. Garland said the fact that a forger got caught in the gambling campaign shows that safeguards are in place to thwart such practices.

City and town clerks take their jobs seriously and act as watchdogs "to preserve the integrity of the petition process," as they did in this case, said Adams, who was a Republican candidate for governor in 1994. "I think the solution is already in place," she said.

Lechner, the lawyer for the pro-gambling group, took a similar view. He said only one campaign worker out of about 100 appears to have forged signatures in that campaign, and that person got caught. "It's an isolated incident," Lechner said. The fact that the forgeries were detected by municipal officials and reported to the state shows that the system worked, he said.