The campaign for a ballot initiative seeking to redirect clean energy funds to the Portland Police Bureau announced Monday it had submitted enough signatures to the city to qualify for the November ballot. The next day, the Portland Auditor’s Office and Oregon Secretary of State received lengthy new complaints alleging the campaign committed a handful of distinct election law violations while gathering those signatures.
The complaints, filed by Portland attorney Alan Kessler in his individual capacity, allege canvassers working for the Safer Portland campaign on behalf of the Portland Enhanced Community Safety Initiative, routinely misled voters and failed to follow state guidelines while collecting signatures. These allegations have previously been reported in the Mercury. The complaints, which were filed with the city and state, also say the campaign mishandled signature sheets and sent canvassers out without the full text of the petition. Kessler’s complaints point to six separate election law violations.
They’re the latest in a growing number of complaints over alleged legal missteps in the signature gathering process for the Safer Portland campaign. As of Wednesday, the Secretary of State confirmed it had received 77 complaints related to the campaign.
“A measure earns its place on the ballot by proving that a minimum number of voters think it deserves a public vote,” Kessler’s complaint states. “A signature from a voter who had no opportunity to read the measure, or to whom it was misrepresented, provides no such proof.”
The initiative requires 40,437 valid signatures from voters to qualify for the November ballot. On Monday, the campaign submitted 63,315 signatures for verification. Kessler’s complaint asks state and local elections officials to review a trove of evidence he submitted, to consider whether the signatures were collected lawfully and should be counted. Kessler’s complaint was first reported by Willamette Week.
The Secretary of State’s Office declined to comment on whether the complaints could disqualify the initiative from the November ballot, but legal experts say if the complaints lead to enough signatures being thrown out, it could jeopardize the effort.
Among the evidence in Kessler’s complaint: videos showing unattended signature sheets left out at local businesses, videos showing petition circulators giving false information or failing to provide a full text of the ballot measure, and screenshots from the campaign’s own website about potentially mishandled signature sheets. The evidence also cites Mercury reporting from June outlining dozens of complaints filed with the Secretary of State, including from former employees for FieldWorks, the Washington, DC-based company hired to collect signatures for the measure. Some employees said they were trained to intentionally mislead voters about the measure.
“I do not ask for prosecution of, or penalties against, any individual circulator,” the complaint states. “The circulators worked from a script, under training and supervision the campaign and its vendor controlled.”
Kessler sued to challenge the initiative earlier this year before it was certified for signature gathering. His latest complaints are separate from that lawsuit.
“The big divide in my mind is that some of what is happening, if it happened the way I think it happened, may be criminal,” Kessler told the Mercury. “If there’s an active disinformation campaign in order to get this on the ballot, that’s a crime.”
Elise Haas, a spokesperson for the Safer Portland campaign, pointed to Kessler’s previous legal challenge—which was one of two challenges lobbed at the initiative and led to a delay in signature gathering.
“This is more of the same,” Haas told the Mercury Wednesday. “Throughout this process, a small group of organized opponents has repeatedly tried to use procedural challenges to stop Portland voters from having their say, and those efforts have consistently fallen short. Meanwhile, more than 63,000 Portlanders from every corner of the city signed this initiative because they want a safer Portland with faster emergency response times and better policing. Voters deserve the opportunity to decide this issue for themselves.”
Whether voters get to decide is now in the hands of elections officials.
Dan Meek is an election law attorney who reviewed Kessler’s complaints and evidence. Meek said the Secretary of State, Portland Auditor’s Office, and Multnomah County Elections Office each have a role to play in determining whether the initiative makes it to the ballot, but the roles are “somewhat convoluted.”
“The Secretary of State and the auditor enforce the laws that certify how the signatures were collected,” Meek explained. He said typically, elections officials are going sheet-by-sheet to certify signatures.
In the case of the Safer Portland initiative, where signature sheets were allegedly left unattended at local businesses for voters to sign without the full text of the ballot measure in view, Meek said that could nullify those sheets if officials can track them down.
“The Secretary of State and in the case of the city auditor can rule that various signature sheets can be thrown out,” Meek said. In cases where a signature collector is believed to have given voters false information, Meek said they can usually trace sheets back to the person who submitted them.
“The others you might have to go circulator by circulator,” he explained. “An individual circulator might have circulated 100 or 200 sheets and they can identify the sheets that were submitted.”
While the city’s Auditor’s Office is responsible for making sure petitioners have gathered enough signatures, the city relies on the Multnomah County Elections Office for signature verification because it can validate signatures through state voter rolls.
That’s done using a 10 percent sampling of the total number of signatures submitted—not a line-by-line accounting of all the signatures— automated by the state voter registration system.
Neither the county nor the city is responsible for investigating complaints related to the initiative. That job falls to the Secretary of State.
Portland Elections Division Manager Deborah Scroggin confirmed the city is working with the county to verify signatures, with a deadline to complete that verification by August 5. If state elections officials determine any of the signature gathering complaints against Safer Portland are valid, that gets communicated to the city.
“We are in communication with the Secretary of State’s Office about this matter,” Scroggin said via email. “As always, we will defer to any decision by the SOS in matters where they have the authority to direct us.”
