Income tax Initiative 1098 supported by fraudulent signatures, officials acknowledge
Posted by Scott "The Piper" St. Clair - July 15, 2010UPDATE: I will be speaking on the phony-signature issue Friday afternoon on the Lars Larson Northwest Show on 750 KXL in Portland at just after 12:30 pm, and then again on the Victoria Taft Show on 860 KPAM at 2:40 pm. If you are out of the Portland area, you can listen via streaming audio or, if you can't catch the shows when broadcast, they will be linked on the websites a day or so after broadcast.
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Evidence of fraudulent signatures on petitions for Initiative 1098, the high-earner income tax measure, has been uncovered by the Secretary of State’s office and submitted to the Washington State Patrol for investigation.
Officials at the Secretary of State’s office referred the matter to the WSP Thursday morning after
reviewing some 20 pages of signatures all submitted by the same individual and containing what appeared to be signatures written in “the same ink, same handwriting,” said Communications Director David Ammons.Ammons characterized the signatures as having “a high degree of fraud” that “does shock the conscience.”
He refused to disclose the identity of the individual who submitted the petitions because the office is under a blanket court order not to release petition information. Ammons said that they would like to get the existing court order lifted in order to release the name of the individual and the challenged signatures.
Dan Sytman, a spokesman for the Washington State Attorney General’s Office, said that they want to have the court order lifted and they are working to that end.
Director of Elections Nick Handy said that the problem signatures came to light within hours of commencing a routine check of signature sheets submitted in support of the petition. A visual check of the sheets revealed several that appeared to contain signatures all written by a single person. At that point, election workers cross checked the name of the individual who gathered the signatures with voter registration records to verify her identity. They then segregated the 20 sheets containing 360 signatures submitted by that person.Signature gatherers have been required to sign the back of sheets they submit for the past two years, an innovation that has helped the Secretary of State’s office identify anyone who appears to be using fraudulent practices, Handy said.
Handy could not say whether all 360 names were bad. A determination to that effect would not be made until late Thursday afternoon, he said.
Additional signature sheets for the initiative were then reviewed with “heightened awareness,” but the results so far show that invalid signatures are well within the statistical margin of error at 14 percent, Handy said.
The typical signature-rejection rate is between 12 to 18 percent, Handy said.
The suspect sheets were being kept in a secure location in order to maintain a proper chain of custody, he said.
While rumors are circulating as to the identity of the individual who submitted the suspect signatures, no positive identification has been made other than that the person is a female living in King County. News reports have linked her to Local 775 NW of the Service Employees International Union.
Local 775 NW spokesman Adam Glickman confirmed that a union member was under investigation both by authorities and the union. He refused to identify her, but he did say that she was a member of the individual care provider bargaining team who had been removed from that position of responsibility as a result of the investigation.
Individual care providers are persons who receive payment from the state for providing in-home care for the elderly and disabled. Local 775 NW represents them among its 40,000 members throughout the northwest.
Glickman said that his union will cooperate fully with the Secretary of State’s investigation as well as conducting one of its own. “We won’t tolerate the use of union funds for alleged illegal or unethical activity,” he said.
Notified of the problem Wednesday afternoon, Glickman refused to say whether anyone within the union had been in direct contact with the woman who allegedly submitted the signature sheets.
While the case has been referred to the Washington State Patrol, what they will do with it is unknown. Lt. Dennis Bosman of the Criminal Division said that the WSP is trying to determine whether it is the appropriate agency to handle the matter, and that decision rests with Chief John R. Batiste.
Bosman said he did not know when Chief Batiste would make his decision. “It’s not automatic,” he said.
Both Ammons and Handy said that they believed this was an isolated instance of one individual engaging in improper conduct. Both said that they had no reason to suspect other petitions submitted by anyone affiliated with Local 775 NW or to engage in a full, 100 percent check of all I-1098 signatures.
Ammons said that the Secretary of State’s office will aggressively deal with the case but that the number of bad signatures submitted by the one individual represented one-tenth of one percent of the total submitted for the petition. The initiative needed 241,000 signatures to make November’s ballot, and 385,000, a record for signatures on an initiative in Washington state, were submitted on 25,000 signature sheets, Ammons said.
Handy said that he had “no reason to believe that this is other than one gatherer.” He characterized the case as “unusual,” and he said that he did not know of anything like it in the elections division in the past 10 years.
“We take any fraud allegation in the election process very seriously,” Handy said. “We have made a very conscientious effort to see whether this is an isolated incident involving only one checker.”
Signing an initiative petition with other than your true name is a Class C felony under Washington state law and punishable by up to five years in prison and a $10,000 fine. Whether each individual fraudulent signature constitutes a separate crime or whether all the signatures will be lumped together constituting one crime is an open question.
AG spokesman Sytman said that the decision to file one charge to cover all of the facts or one charge for each signature rests with the prosecuting attorney in the county in which the alleged offense occurred, in this case King County. “It’s too early in the process to venture an opinion on what should be done,” he said.
A call to the I-1098 campaign requesting comment had not been returned as of 4:30 pm Thursday.
Thoughts? Add Comment -
my name is Ben said on Jul 18 2010 at 11:39pm
I'm with you guys on this one. We are paying our government officials to review less than 1/10th the required signatures for a measure to get on the ballot. What is that judge smoking and did he pay for it with our tax money?
corey said on Jul 20 2010 at 12:51pm
test