Denham Recall Drives G.O.P. Lawmakers to Accept Overdue Reforms in Signature Gathering Regulations

[courtesy of California Progress Report]

By Bill Cavala
A veteran of over 30 years in Sacramento

Since the 1980’s, initiative campaigns have been big business. Where once initiatives were few and far between because of the difficulty of signature gathering (a large grass roots movement was usually required), now signature-gathering firms were formed to qualify petitions for money.

The people were hired under the fiction of “independent contractors” so that the firms would not have to pay social security or workers compensation benefits (as required by law for employers). They were not paid a “wage” – which might have made them employees – but instead paid on a ‘bounty’ basis: so much per signature.

People employed in this business would come and go. But the local “contractors” who worked for the parent firms would have a network of people interested in work of this sort. Those who were successful were those who could talk people into signing petitions. The most successful had the skills of carnival con men.

Voters are routinely conned into signing petitions for ballot measures they might well oppose if they knew its real purpose. But they are provided information designed to get them to sign, not to inform them. If you sign this, the “people will get to decide”, and so on.

Some enthusiastic signature gatherers go further than this, and don’t bother to get real signatures at all. They simply forge a voters name to the petition.

Democrats used to have this problem in spades with their voter registration drives as they paid thousands for phony registrations. We dug out from under with a combination of demanding prosecution of the miscreants and ending the ‘independent contractor’ fiction. Democrats now hire “employees”, pay by the hour, provide the benefits required by law and don’t pay bounty-per-signature which is an incentive for fraud.

Republicans, presumably for ideological reasons, maintain the fraud-ridden bounty system.

Efforts to reform this system have been resisted by the G.O.P. for years as merely disguised attempts to thwart the people’s right to the initiative, referendum and recall. The Elections Committee served as a graveyard for many such bills – while the few that survived died at the hands of Republican Governors.