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Editorial: Hard line on signature fraud case essential

Sat., Sept. 18, 2010

For reasons having nothing to do with the merits or drawbacks of a state income tax, it’s good to hear that the King County prosecuting attorney is following up on an alleged signature fraud in the petition drive for Initiative 1098.

Felony charges were filed this week against the public employee union staffer suspected of falsifying hundreds of signatures during the drive to qualify the income tax proposal for the Nov. 2 general election.

In a state that worships citizens’ legislative rights, the integrity of that process must be preserved. Six initiatives will be on this year’s ballot, and every one of them, including I-1098, got there because legions of petition circulators scoured the state earlier this year soliciting voters’ signatures on behalf of various causes.

Motivated by pay, passion or both, signature gatherers haunted shopping centers, trolled community fairs and traipsed door to door – as they do every year. The stakes are high – witness the tens of millions of dollars interest groups will spend for and against this year’s six measures – and the temptation to inflate numbers is great.

Fortunately, state election workers in the secretary of state’s office were keen-eyed and principled enough to blow the whistle when a spot check of signatures revealed suspicious irregularities. A Washington State Patrol investigation subsequently found evidence of falsified signatures, and Claudia Renea McKinney, an employee of Service Employees International Union, now stands charged with “signature violation by signer.”

We’re comforted that authorities are pursuing the matter with apparent vigor. As Secretary of State Sam Reed has put it, the people of Washington “expect a clean and trustworthy process that is free of signature fraud.”

There’s no practical way to remove the incentive for signature fraud, however, so ample means have to be in place to detect it if it does happen. Ongoing vigilance by state and local elections workers is a vital safeguard, of course, but it’s not enough. Public access to the petitions, which the U.S. Supreme Court has confirmed are public records, allows citizens to provide backup oversight. That access must be secured.

That access, it so happens, is at stake in a case now pending before a federal court in Tacoma where backers of Referendum 71, a 2009 effort to repeal gay-rights legislation, want to keep their petitions secret. Yes, the same petitions that they openly displayed to anyone who was willing to look when the signature drive was under way.

That issue rests on the petition signers’ fear of violent retaliation from political opponents if their names and addresses are disclosed – an easy concern to assert in any petition drive. Before courts grant the secrecy Referendum 71 backers are asking, they need to impose a high burden of proof to determine that claimed threats are real, specific and severe enough to warrant compromising the trustworthiness extolled by the secretary of state.