Ballot Signature Fraud at UCSB

Several readers today emailed me about a story that has already been reported at The Daily Kos. It turns out that paid signature gatherers are duping students at UCSB with a series of nefarious initiatives separated by a rubber band and assurances that one needs to sign the original initiative four times and that the other pieces of paper they sign have nothing to do with the first.

Arno Political Consultants should be sued for hiring, training and sending out initiative gatherers that don't understand the rights of voters. In the past, they have tricked Florida college kids into registering Republican and saying an electoral ballot initiative was an anti-war initiative. Perhaps worst was telling Massachusetts voters that an anti-gay initiative was actually an initiative that would allow wine to be sold in grocery stores. Yuck.

Community Post by a Dedicated Reader

So today I witnessed what I think is an incidence of ballot initiative fraud relating to the electoral vote apportionment initiative. Outside the UCEN (student center) at UC Santa Barbara, there were a number of people with cardboard clipboards soliciting people to sign ballot petitions for a proposal to spend $1 billion on cancer hospitals for kids. If you agree to sign, they tell you "you need to sign 4 times." What they do not tell you is that the three pages after the ballot initiative on concern hospitals are different ballot intiatives: the second proposes to abolish eminent domain, the third proposals to abolish rent control, and the fourth is the proposal to apportion California's electoral votes by district (the so-called Dirty Tricks Initiative).

I should note that the clipboard is arranged such that a rubber band holding the petitions to the cardboard is positioned on the top of the page, across the actual ballot language in question - thus, partially hiding the text of the ballot initiatives on pages 2-4 unless you actually stop and pull down the top of the page.

I agreed to sign the cancer initiative, but the comment about signing four times raised a red flag, because I'm familiar with the structure of ballot petitions, so I paused before signing and looked at the other initiatives.

However, I'm absolutely sure that most of the people signing, young college students on a rush to get their lunches and off to class, did not take this step.

What they are doing is getting people to sign for ballot initiatives without their knowledge or informed consent, using young peoples' desire to do a good thing and their lack of familiarity with the legal paperwork of initiative petitions. If this is not illegal it is certainly deeply unethical. The moment I realized what was going on, I told the petitioners that they shouldn't be telling people to sign for ballot initiatives they're not aware of. Immediately after, I called the school newspaper, the Daily Nexus, the Courage Campaign, the Santa Barbara Democratic Central Committee, and the California Democratic Party. I have also contacted
the Secretary of State to report this.