April 01, 2009 07:03 PM UTC

Making Petition Shenanigans Slightly Tougher

• 8 Comments
• by: Colorado Pols

Just about everybody can agree by now that anything will help, even a comparatively mild ‘training’ requirement–as the Pueblo Chieftain reports:

State lawmakers plan to crack down on fraud when it comes to getting measures on the ballot.

A bipartisan bill that won unanimous support Tuesday in a House committee would place more oversight on ballot petition drives, similar to what the state already does with voter registration efforts.

“This bill came about because of some incidents that happened this last election cycle with fraudulent petition circulators, petition circulators who would not appear when subpoenaed to court, who gave false and misleading addresses,” said House Speaker Terrance Carroll, D-Denver.

“The idea behind this bill is to make sure that when something gets on the ballot, we know that it got there properly, we know that it got there through an ethical petition circulator process,” Carroll said.

The measure has the backing of 27 other representatives and seven senators from both parties, including Reps. Buffie McFadyen, D-Pueblo West, and Ed Vigil, D-Fort Garland. It would require that paid petition companies register with the secretary of state’s office, and go through training on how petitions are to be filed. Last year, there was evidence that some petitions were improperly filed, including one initiative backer that used children as young as 14 to gather signatures, but had adults verify that they had done the work…

“You can put something on the ballot if you’ve got the money,” Secretary of State Bernie Buescher said. “We should just not accept that Colorado law is for sale. This bill recognizes that.

“The broad outline of this bill is very, very clear,” he added. “There needs to be training, we need to make sure that those folks who sign an initiative know what they are doing, we need to make sure that the folks who are carrying an initiative do so in an honest and forthright fashion.”

The nasty allegations of deception over last year’s “civil rights amendment” were enough to warrant some kind of crackdown on the shady methods employed by users (and abusers) of the state’s already low-barrier initiative process. If anything this bill could go further than it does, which shows how far we’ve come from Jon Caldara’s “open the floodgates” Amendment 38 back in ’06.