Signature gatherer’s work probed

OLYMPIA – In a case that may involve very careless or very blatant forgery, elections officials Friday turned over petitions with as many as 349 bogus signatures to the State Patrol Forensics Lab. The volunteer who submitted them could face felony fraud charges.

The suspect’s name is being withheld, but elections officials have confirmed this much about her: She is a member of the Service Employees International Union, which is backing Initiative 1098, but wasn’t being paid for her efforts.

She may have misunderstood the verification process, which is often referred to as a “spot check,” when initiative drives pass a certain level of signatures. Before that spot check of 3 percent of submitted signatures occurs, however, all the sheets are examined for names that are illegible, have missing signatures or addresses or other obvious errors.

During that first process, elections workers noticed six sheets that stood out because they were all in the same ink, and seemed to be in the same handwriting, said David Ammons, a spokesman for the secretary of state’s office. “There was no real effort to have the look and feel of a petition sheet, which is normally quite varied.”

Typically, when 20 different people sign a petition sheet, they often use different pens, and can do it at different times and in different places.

Elections workers saw the same gatherer’s name on the back of each sheet. They pulled all her sheets, and found more that seemed to be in the same handwriting. Some appear to be actual voters, but the signatures don’t match the ones on file; others have bad addresses, Ammons said. In the end, 89 percent of the signatures submitted by that gatherer were bad; the average failure rate is about 18 percent.

Forensics experts will look at the sheets before the case is turned over to the King County prosecuting attorney, who makes the first call on filing criminal charges because that’s where the suspect lives.

The questioned signatures represent about one-tenth of 1 percent of the total submitted and the remaining petitions had a failure rate on par with other ballot measures, Ammons said. “There seems to be no systematic effort to stuff the ballot box,” he said.

I-1098 got about a third of its signatures, around 120,000, from volunteers and the remainder from paid collectors, Sandeep Kaushik, a spokesman for I-1098, said Friday.

The motive behind the alleged fraud is a mystery, Kaushik said. The SEIU apparently wasn’t offering any prizes or bonuses, so he doesn’t know of any financial motive for turning in phony signatures, if that’s in fact what happened.

“We had more than 1,000 volunteers across the state,” he said. “I don’t want this to cast a cloud over that effort.”