US District Court Judge Michael H. Simon denied a request to recount signatures in a failed ballot initiative that sought to redirect Portland Clean Energy Fund money to the Portland Police Bureau. The determination was handed down in an opinion issued Thursday, September 3 in response to a lawsuit filed by petitioners of the initiative.
“The City and County Defendants applied state and local election laws, rules, and standards in good faith, even-handedly, and in a politically neutral manner, all to protect the reliability and integrity of the election process,” Simon wrote in his opinion.
The lawsuit, filed by plaintiffs Bob Simril and Juanita Smartwood, contends that Portland and Multnomah County elections officials mishandled the signature verification process for the Portland Enhanced Community Safety ballot initiative, AKA the Safer Portland initiative, and potentially excluded thousands of valid signatures. Plaintiffs asked the federal court to order an independent entity, like the Secretary of State’s office, to conduct a recount of the signatures in time to make a fresh determination whether the initiative qualified for the November ballot. Thursday’s legal ruling closes the door on that possibility.
The legal complaint was filed after Multnomah County and the city confirmed August 4 that the Enhanced Community Safety Initiative had failed to garner enough valid signatures to qualify for the November ballot. Elections officials noted that thousands of signatures were invalid because they were from voters who were not registered to vote in the city of Portland. Some people had also signed the petition twice, elections officials found.
The lawsuit yielded responses from the city of Portland’s elections office, along with Multnomah County Elections and Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read—all dissenting to the plaintiffs’ request for a preliminary injunction.
The Portland Auditor’s Office, which houses the Elections Office, outlined the rigorous steps it took in compliance with state law, to verify signatures and exclude those which didn’t meet established standards. Officials with both offices insisted they kept the petitioners apprised of issues along the way, and worked to verify issues with invalid signatures, even leaving time for the petitioners to correct problems, where possible. They say the plaintiffs asked for accommodations and courtesies beyond what the legal process allows.
“Examination of Plaintiffs’ alleged errors against the applicable legal standards does not suggest a process that was ‘irregular, arbitrary, and inconsistent,'” attorneys for Portland Auditor Simone Rede and Elections Division Manager Deborah Scroggin stated in an August 31 court brief replying to the lawsuit. “Instead, the evidence shows that Plaintiffs wanted different rules applied to 1PDX2026 than to other petitions.”
Judge Simon heard evidence and witnesses in the case on Tuesday, September 1. The plaintiffs in the case are the campaign’s two chief petitioners, Simril and Smartwood, volunteer circulator Alan Comnes, and Portland resident John Hollister. The plaintiffs asked Simon to issue a preliminary injunction that would trigger a mandatory, expedited recount of the signatures collected.
“Everything about the process was weighted toward rejection and voter disenfranchisement, not acceptance and voter enfranchisement,” the complaint stated.
The lawsuit alleged that nearly half the submissions thrown out during preprocessing had a rejection rate over three times the rate for the “Community Budgeting for All” initiative, which the same city and county offices handled during the same period.
Scroggin said her office appreciated the court’s consideration and welcomed the decision.
“The plaintiffs had the opportunity to test their allegations in federal court, where claims must be supported by evidence,” Scroggin said in a statement provided to the Mercury. “The Court denied their request to reinvent Oregon law. Portland City Elections followed the law, applied the same standards used for every petition, and accurately reported the result. We are gratified that the Court recognized the integrity of that work.”
The Secretary of State’s office and Multnomah County officials declined to comment on the ruling Thursday. Attorneys for the plaintiff did not respond to the Mercury‘s request for comment at the time of publishing.
Trouble has found the initiative from the start. The Secretary of State’s office continues to investigate nearly 100 complaints filed by community members, attorneys, and former employees of Field Works, the company hired to collect signatures on behalf of Safer Portland. As the Mercury reported in June, a former employee hired by Field Works said he and other staff were trained to intentionally mislead people in an effort to gather more signatures.
But at every step after submitting its signatures, the chief petitioners alleged misbehavior on the part of the elections office. They claimed the office declared matching signatures as mismatches, declined to receive additional evidence to back up their claims that petition sheets were unnecessarily thrown out, and refused to pause the signature process to address the issues.
By July 28, Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read sent a letter to Rede, the Portland auditor, saying he was concerned about the process. The Safer Portland group had appealed to the Oregon Secretary of State’s Office to take over the verification, but Read declined, instead sending the letter.
“What I have seen in recent days regarding the 1PDX2026 initiative signature verification process reflects poorly on our state’s entire election system,” Read wrote.
That piece of Read’s letter soon became the opening line in the plaintiffs’ legal complaint, but Read found himself as a defendant in the case anyway. It was unclear at the time what had prompted the letter.
But in the September 1 testimony, Paige Richardson—a witness called by the Safer Portland attorneys—said she spoke with Secretary Read directly at a political fundraising event on July 26 to alert the state official about complaints targeting the signature verification process.
“You’re going to hear more,” Richardson recalled telling Read, noting in her court testimony that she sensed the issue was going to be litigated in court, but refrained from divulging that to Read at the time.
Richardson said she was aware that others had called him directly to talk about their concerns.
Thursday’s opinion from Judge Simon closes the door on the initiative making the ballot this November. Simon said voting and petitioning are critically important for democracy, but agreed that elections officials correctly applied local, state, and federal laws.
“(D)emocracy itself depends on the rule of law and cannot exist without it,” Simon stated.
This story will be updated.
Taylor Griggs contributed to this reporting.
