A ballot initiative that sought to direct 25 percent of Portland’s Clean Energy Fund toward hiring additional police officers failed to gather enough valid signatures to qualify for the November ballot.
The Portland City Auditor’s Office, which houses Portland’s Elections Division, confirmed Tuesday afternoon that after sampling and verification, the number of qualified signatures for the Enhanced Community Safety Initiative wasn’t enough to reach the 40,437 signature-requirement.
“The primary reason the petition failed to qualify was the low number of signatures from registered Portland voters,” an announcement from the Auditor’s Office states. “Only 61 percent of signatures in statistical samples were valid. In the combined samples, over 70 percent of rejected signatures were from signers who were not registered voters or did not live in Portland.”
The Elections Division cited “the high number of instances where the same person signed the petition two or more times” as the secondary reason for the initiative failing to garner enough valid signatures to qualify for the ballot.
Inklings of trouble surfaced last week when the initiative’s chief petitioners accused the Portland Elections Division of mishandling the signature verification process, as thousands of signatures were being disqualified. As the Mercury reported last week, many of those who signed petitions for the Safety Initiative weren’t registered to vote in Portland—a requirement for anyone signing a petition to get a citywide measure on a ballot.
According to elections officials, the city rejected 8,426 invalid signature lines from the petition as part of state-mandated pre-processing.
The City submitted 55,837 signatures for verification.
“After verifying statistical samples as state law requires, officials determined that the petition contained 34,130 valid signatures,” the Auditor’s Office announcement states. “Notably, at that validity rate, the petition would have failed to qualify even if the City had sampled all 63,315 signatures petitioners reported submitting.”
Petitioners can choose to appeal the Elections Division’s determination and seek a legal review.
“The chief petitioners can seek judicial review of the City’s determination, which is based on the Multnomah County Elections Office verification process,” says local election law attorney Dan Meek, describing the appeal process. Meek said petitioners would first need to file a lawsuit in Multnomah County Circuit Court.
“That decision can then be appealed to the Oregon Court of Appeals and eventually to the Oregon Supreme Court,” Meek notes, but says all of those legal steps would need to happen extremely quickly in order to have a decision rendered before ballots get printed in time for the November election.
In a statement Tuesday, the petitioners said they “intend to file legal action challenging this decision and process.”
Issues with signature gathering were first reported by the Mercury in June, when a former canvassing employee of a company hired to collect signatures on behalf of the initiative said he and others were told to intentionally mislead people about the proposed measure in an effort to solicit more signatures.
Shortly afterward, several voters filed complaints against the canvassers and chief petitioners for alleged elections law violations related to the signature-gathering process for the initiative. The Oregon Secretary of State’s Office confirmed it had received nearly 100 complaints as of last week. Investigations into those complaints are still active, and are separate from the process for verifying ballot eligibility.
“The investigation will continue regardless of the outcome of the signature verification process,” Connor Radnovich, a spokesperson with the Oregon SoS, said Tuesday.
The Enhanced Community Safety Initiative, managed by a campaign called “Safer Portland,” has asserted the verification process was unfair and inaccurate. On July 31, the initiative’s chief petitioner, Cameron Smith, sent a lengthy, 12-page letter to the Auditor’s office—which houses the Elections Division—alleging the Auditor’s verification preprocessing phase contained errors, resulting in some signatures being unnecessarily tossed.
“If, after a lawful and accurate verification process, the petition qualifies or fails to qualify, we will accept that result,” the July 31 letter states. “What we cannot accept is a verification process that proceeds on a petition universe materially affected by demonstrable preprocessing errors.”
The initiative’s chief petitioners allege the Elections Division removed a broad swath of signature sheets during the preprocessing phase based on perceived errors, like whether a person’s signature matched that on file with the Multnomah County Elections Office.
The Safer Portland campaign said that after reviewing rejected signature sheets, “there were many matching signatures which were erroneously declared mismatches.”
Both city and county officials say their processes follow state law. While the city is responsible for making sure petitioners’ submitted signatures meet the threshold and make the ballot, the city relies on the county for the verification process. The county can legally access state voter rolls to validate signatures after the city has determined whether the sheets themselves are valid.
During preprocessing, the city reviews petition sheets to ensure they are correctly filled out, and rejects any sheets that don’t conform to the standards laid out in state law. The city then submits the remaining signatures to the county. As with any state petition, the county does not do a line-by-line accounting of every signature. Instead, as outlined in state law, it uses a sampling of the signatures submitted by the city. The state voter registration system automates a randomized sample, and the county cross-references with state voter rolls to verify each signature included in the sample.
Signees must be registered in the district where the petition applies, their registration must be active, and the signer information must be legible.
The ballot initiative was well-funded, garnering $1.4 million in contributions, according to state records. The Portland Police Association (PPA), the union representing Portland’s rank-and-file officers, contributed nearly $800,000 to the initiative’s political action committee, Community Safety Coalition PAC.
When reached by phone Tuesday, PPA President Aaron Schmautz declined to comment on whether the PPA would be willing to fund another initiative related to police staffing. Schmautz deferred questions about specific hiring targets within the Police Bureau and staffing logistics to the Safer Portland campaign.
In a statement released by Safer Portland shortly after the Auditor’s Office announced the initiative did not qualify for the ballot, Schmautz continued to accuse local elections officials of mishandling the verification process.
“This is a loss for Portlanders who suffer under a police staffing crisis that is damaging the safety, livability, and prosperity of our city,” Schmautz said. “On behalf of disenfranchised Portland voters, we intend to file legal action challenging this decision and process. We are not seeking a guaranteed court outcome for the initiative, just a fair, accurate and transparent process. Portlanders must have a voice in the direction of our city. The fight for a safer, better Portland for everyone is not over.”
