The NPR Politics Podcast - Fraud Risk? Candidates Pay Signature Gatherers To Get On Ballot

Episode Date: April 6, 2023

Want to put yourself or your cause on the ballot? Generally, you need to gather signatures first in order to signal support for your message. Last year, five would-be GOP gubernatorial hopefuls in Michigan were disqualified after allegedly fraudulent signatures were discovered on their petition documents. Now, election officials are raising the alarm about the risks associated with paid signature-gathering. This episode: White House correspondent Tamara Keith, voting correspondent Miles Parks, and voting correspondent Ashley Lopez.The podcast is produced by Elena Moore and Casey Morell. It is edited by Eric McDaniel. Our executive producer is Muthoni Muturi. Research and fact-checking by Devin Speak.Unlock access to this and other bonus content by supporting The NPR Politics Podcast+. Sign up via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org. Giveaway: npr.org/politicsplusgiveaway Connect:Email the show at [e-mail] the NPR Politics Podcast Facebook Group.Subscribe to the NPR Politics Newsletter.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Hi, this is Scott in my kitchen in New York, decorating a cake for Wilson, our 13-year-old Beagle's bark mitzvah. This podcast was recorded at... Oh my God, 1.06 p.m. on Thursday, the 6th of April. Things may have changed by the time you hear it. I will somehow still be responsible to make his celebration happen, even though it was my adult daughter's idea. Wilson is eagerly supervising my work. Okay, here's the show. Does he know his Torah portion? And what is his Torah portion? That time stamp had like two reveals. Like it was like, I thought it was a kid and then it was a dog and then the bark mitzvah just nailed it. Nailed the punchline.

I'm very upset that I've gone through life never hearing the term bark mitzvah. This is such a good day. Hey there. It's the NPR Politics Podcast. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting.

And I'm Ashley Lopez. I also cover voting. The 2022 Michigan gubernatorial primary was upended when several GOP candidates turned in faulty signatures on the petitions required to enter the race. Now to the shakeup in the race for governor. Five Republican candidates now officially thrown off the ballot. That's half the field. The problem was petition signature fraud, and it is an issue many campaign professionals and elections officials are worried about. Ashley, this is a story that you've been reporting. So let's start with what happened in Michigan. Yeah. So last year,

a slew of campaigns up and down the ballot in Michigan were unable to get their candidate or their issue on the ballot because they turned in too many invalid signatures to the state and not the required number of valid signatures. It turns out a lot of these campaigns had hired people to help them collect signatures. Election officials looked into what happened later, and they found that something like 36 signature gatherers submitted fraudulent sheets. They also found at least 68,000 invalid signatures were submitted across something like 10 sets of nominating petitions, which officials wrote is a scale of fraud that they had just never seen before,

even though this is like, you know, signature fraud isn't wholly uncommon. And as was mentioned at the top there, like half the slate of the Republican gubernatorial primary were unable to be on the ballot, were basically tossed off because of signature issues. So this was like a huge political shakeup in Michigan last year. Yeah, I mean, I remember hearing about it. How in the world does that level of fraud take place? Were they like all using the same company or like how did that happen? That's harder to pin down. I think there were a couple of like similar paid gatherers who like came up a couple of times in their investigation. But I think there were a couple of companies in play play here. And you know, petition signature fraud usually looks like, you know, someone turning in fake

names, the names of dead voters, or sometimes canvassers use this practice called roundtabling, which is something that election officials in Michigan saw some evidence of, which is, this is when like individual canvassers pass around a petition sheet and each person signs a line. So it looks like a bunch of different voters signed it. And I just also want to say like not all invalid signatures are fraudulent, right? A lot of times voters will like mistakenly sign a petition once or twice because they like twice or like more than that because they forget that they signed it the first time. You know, sometimes petitions are around for a long time and you don't always remember what you filled out or they put their information wrong. That happens too, But that is not fraud. Fraud in this context is more like faking a voter.

Well, and I think I mean, that number, the tens of thousands of signatures is eye popping. But I do do think it's worth noting, right, that like this is not a new problem. I was talking to Colorado's election director a couple of ago, Judd Choate, at an event, and he said straight up, checking signatures in this way to get things on about is like the hardest part of being an election administrator. So this is a problem that has been around for a long time and a problem that election officials have been dealing with for a long time. I think the idea here is that there should be a threshold for entry that, you know, a candidate needs to show that they have enough support from voters to mount a campaign or that a ballot initiative has, you know, enough people that care about that issue and want that issue on the ballot. So here, go gather all these signatures and prove that this thing really matters and is something that the populace wants. But what we're describing here is a professional operation where this isn't like really passionate, earnest volunteers outside the grocery store.

It is people who are being paid cold, hard cash to gather signatures. And there are companies, big companies involved. How widespread is that? Do you have any sense of how much of it is earnest people who care about the issue or the candidate and how much of it is people making money? I mean, scale is hard to measure because I will say this is a part of elections that just doesn't get a lot of attention. I mean, there's not a lot of academics who study this. It's very different from state to state. Not all states require candidates, for example, to sign to get a bunch of signatures before they get on the ballot. But I will say, I think what came up last year is that sometimes it is going to be harder, depending what's happening, to get people to, you know, volunteer to knock on doors to stand outside. I mean, during the pandemic in particular, especially early pandemic, like 2020, this was tough, right? Like volunteers were just harder to find depending on how safe

they felt. So I mean, I think we are after the pandemic in like a different situation. Like maybe there was a point in time where paid canvassers were a smaller portion and now it's just a bigger industry because there was a bigger need coming out of the pandemic. But again, in terms of numbers and scale, it's really hard to pin down. And actually, I mean, experts across the board, like people in the industry, academics, and even, you know, state officials say that they think like a good way to limit the amount of fraud in this realm of elections is actually not to pay people per signature. They think that is a big issue here because it's gotten so expensive. And we're talking about like many years ago, it must have been like $2 or $3 a signature, which is not nothing, especially when you need

thousands of signatures to get on a ballot, to now upwards of $20 and $30. This is a seismic shift in the amount of money in politics, in this particular realm of politics. So what experts are saying is if you pay workers by the hour, there's just like less of an incentive for them to commit fraud. All right, we're going to take a quick break. And when we get back, solutions. And we're back. And Ashley, you alluded to this, but are there regulatory efforts underway or other efforts to address the issues with paid signature gathering? Yeah. So some pretty significant states are taking a look at new laws aimed at regulating these paid canvassers more. So California wants them to register and get

trained by the state. They also want to have new laws and regulations about making sure that paid canvassers accurately describe what's on a petition to voters. They want to definitely curb that practice. And Colorado Secretary of State, her name is Jenna Griswold, told me she wants to be able to penalize bad actors, keep people who have committed signature fraud before out the game, as well as financial penalties and criminal penalties against not just the workers who are submitting fraudulent signatures, but also the companies that hire them. They basically want to get ahead of this, but also penalize people after they commit fraud. It feels like such a tough balance, though, because all those things

seem super reasonable on their face, I think. But I do think that there is this risk. Anytime you start adding regulatory hoops for people to jump through, when you're talking about the whole point of having signatures be a part of getting something on a ballot gives people a real sense of power that they have the ability, that the voters have the ability to get what they want from their government. And the more hoops, even if the hoops are really well-intentioned, I do think that there is a lot of worry in this space that the more hoops you make people jump through to get these signatures, that the less real access people, normal people have to being able to get the signatures needed to get some of this stuff on the ballot. And I will say, I think states like California and Colorado, you know, the folks that I have talked to who are looking to, you know, crack down specifically on paid canvassers, their thinking on this is this would mostly take aim at more of like the astroturfy

aspects of petition gathering, right? Because if there is a groundswell of support for something and there are volunteers, like this would not apply to them. Like I think there are states that do want to make sure there's a balance between making sure the sort of company-based like financial incentive part of this is kept a close eye on, but not affecting the citizen led, volunteer led, grassroots stuff that, yes, is like a super vibrant part of their democracy. So the balance is important. But I think like specifically these states are being careful about that. The big question is when other states start to look at their ballot measure and petition laws, like that could get kind of complicated, right? I have another question about incentives, which is in theory, these candidates and ballot campaigns want valid

signatures. They do not want their signatures to be thrown out. They are hiring a company to get them these signatures. You know, shouldn't their contracts have major consequences in them if they're given faulty signatures? Or, you know, are there non-governmental ways to change the incentive structure? Well, you know, someone I talked to who actually ran into this issue, his name is Jamie Rowe. He tried to get a ballot measure related to voting laws on Michigan's ballot, told me that, you know, in an ideal world, he would have had volunteers do all of this because volunteers actually are far, far less likely to commit signature fraud. If you believe in the cause, like your incentive is just

different than someone who's being paid particularly per signature. But one thing he learned is that, you know, you can ask a company, like, do you pay per signature? Do you pay per hour? And make a decision that way. Or another thing you can see is, has this company been around a long time? A lot of these paid canvasser outfits come and go each election cycle. They're just not around for a long time. And a lot of that is because they do get in trouble. They do, you know, there is sort of criminal activity that, you know, states end up penalizing them for. So I think that's two ways outside of law that particularly if you're a part of campaign,

you can kind of curb this, at least on your end. The thing I do wonder is sort of pulling back the curtain on the fact that there are people who are getting paid to stand outside of your grocery store and that there's fraud that has been committed in sort of fake signatures. Is all this going to make cynical voters even more cynical? I mean, I would hope not. In terms of scale of impact on democracy, what we're talking about here is like much less of an impact than what we would normally call voter fraud, which of course is

exceedingly rare already. But signature fraud is more about the process in which something gets on a ballot. But still, at the end of the day, it is up to voters to vote for something or not. So I think this is in the list of things that voters need to worry about. This is maybe, you know, a little further down the line in terms of things that impact their lives. But in general, the kind of thing that affects like our democracy most concretely, there is a lot of attention on and there are a lot of rules about. Yeah. And Ashley, I mean, your reporting on this has been so great. And I feel like it's so frustrating as a voting reporter that we haven't been able to focus more on like in the nitty gritty election issues like this over the last few years. We've been so focused and lawmakers, state lawmakers, people in Congress have been so focused on threats to election officials and trying to fight back against misinformation.

There are real aspects about American elections that can be improved, that there are good faith efforts to improve. And we just haven't been able to focus on them as much the last few years. But I'm glad this is getting a little bit more time and energy. Yeah. All right. Well, that is it for now. I'm Tamara Keith. I cover the White House. I'm Miles Parks. I cover voting. And I'm Ashley Lopez. I also cover voting. And thank you for listening to the NPR Politics Podcast.