The petition industry operates with few rules and many controversies

When officials at the Reform Party of Arizona launched a petition drive to ensure its place on the 2000 presidential ballot, they turned to Mesa-based Lee Petition Management to get the job done.

The decision nearly proved disastrous.

Signature checking by the Maricopa County Recorder's Office showed that less than half of the signatures turned in were valid.

Desperate party officials went back to Derrick Lee, the company's owner, who agreed to a second contract at a discount rate. Fortunately for the Reform Party, there was time to recirculate the petitions, and Lee ultimately delivered on the signatures he guaranteed. John Gilbert, vice-chairman of the state Reform Party, said he does not blame Lee, but rather unscrupulous petition circulators that Lee hired.

“Derrick Lee hires the unhireables,” said Gilbert of Ahwatukee Foothills. “He does not have a lot of high-end people. And it's not surprising that he got a couple of people who simply tried to run a scam on him.

“He was very embarrassed about it and not at all pleased with the whole situation.”

The petition industry in Arizona operates with few legal boundaries and almost no accountability, according to election and law enforcement officials. It is largely up to circulating companies to police the people who carry petitions on the street.

Two of the six major petition companies in the country are based in the East Valley. Lee Petition Management, which has run petitions from Massachusetts to California, is based out of Mesa. Arizona Petition Partners is a relatively new company located in downtown Tempe.

The companies hire individual petition circulators as independent contractors, not employees. The circulators typically carry multiple petitions, often working for different petition companies at the same time while getting paid for every signature they turn in.

That means companies can easily dodge responsibility when questions arise about signatures, even when there are clear cases of fraud and forgery, said Maricopa County Attorney Richard Romley.

"We do need to go after them," Romley said of individual circulators. "But unless there is greater scrutiny of the people who hire these individuals, we're never going to get to the bottom of it. I've always looked for ways to go after the companies and that’s not easy."

THE PETITION KING

In this industry with almost no rules, Lee reigns as king in Arizona.

Since he started his company in 1997, Lee has been the central player in gathering signatures for initiatives and candidates in every major election. He has also branched out into other states, maintaining a network of people willing to travel from place to place to hustle signatures for the issue of the day.

Recently, Lee petitioners helped gather signatures that led to the recall of Gov. Gray Davis in California.

Lee has run about 200 petition drives, he said. His biggest year was 2000, when he delivered almost 2.5 million signatures in 22 states, he said. Last year, Lee helped deliver signatures for Proposition 202, the Indian gaming initiative sponsored by a coalition of 17 Arizona tribes.

Lee's company also is at the center of many of the major controversies that have arisen in petition drives in recent years. Four of the five paid petition circulators who have been prosecuted for fraud and forgery since 1997 were working for Lee at the time they committed their crimes, according to court records.

The same year that Lee had problems with the Reform Party's petitions, he ran another drive that proved embarrassing. The Pinal County Deputies Association hired him to collect the 1,246 signatures needed to recall an Apache Junction justice of the peace. Checking by county officials showed only about 12 percent of the signatures were valid.

The recall failed and Apache Junction police unsuccessfully pursued a Phoenix homeless man for forgery. Lee walked away without charges, even though one of the petitions included the forged signature of a woman who had died nine months before the petitions were signed. There was some consolation though, said Aubrey Keck, president of the deputies association.

“While we did not have a good result from the company, (Lee) did repay all of our money,” Keck said.

The Maricopa County Recorder's Office still uses petitions from the Reform Party drive in 2000 to train elections officials on how to spot forgeries, said Karen Osborne, elections director for the office. And the fiasco with the Pinal County deputies association still ranks as among the lowest validity rates ever registered in a petition drive in Arizona.

Lee attributed the problems with the Reform Party and justice of the peace recall petitions to “stupid mistakes.”

Reform Party petitions that Lee's own internal checkers had identified as having a high number of invalid signatures had been separated out, he said. They weren't going to be turned in because they would drag down the overall validity rate of the petitions when a statistical verification was run by the county recorder, he said. Somehow, the bad petitions got mixed in with those that were submitted, he said.

On the recall of the Pinal County judge, Lee said circulators passing petitions in Apache Junction — which straddles Pinal and Maricopa counties — collected most of their signatures in Maricopa County. Since it was a Pinal County justice of the peace being recalled, Maricopa County signatures were not counted and that's why the validity rate was only 12 percent, Lee said.

“The person that I was paying to validate my signatures never validated them,” said Lee, adding he was out of town during the recall petition drive. “That cost her her job. She told me she'd checked the signatures and they had obviously never been checked.

“I really trusted a couple of people and they didn't come through,” he said. “Unfortunately, they were high-profile jobs that will probably haunt me until the day I die.”

Lee said he has internal mechanisms to guard against fraud and forgery.

Background checks on circulators are run to determine if they have criminal convictions, but only in Maricopa and Pima counties, Lee said. Before petitions are turned in to the county for verification, they are checked for indications of forgery, he said. If Lee or one of his checkers suspect signatures were forged, the petitions are flagged for county elections officials, he said.

Most forgeries are caught, but some are not, he said.

“If they are really good forgeries you might not catch it,” Lee said. “You try to express to (circulators) that this is serious business. This is more than just dumping your signatures off and hoping that no one is going to take a look because they all get looked at.”

Lee added he is frustrated because many of the suspected forgeries he has turned in to election officials are never prosecuted.

Like other petition companies, Lee's internal checkers also run random samples on each circulator to ensure signatures are from registered voters. Circulators who continually have low validity rates will not be used, he said.

Lee acknowledged most of the controversies that have erupted over petition circulators have involved his company, but said that's largely because he is the most active in Arizona. He added his overall validity rate on petitions is similar to those of his competitors.

“You've got no incentive to turn in bogus signatures if you want to stay in business,” Lee said. “We all loathe bad signatures. We all just avoid them like the plague if we can.”

ODD SIGNATURES IN TEMPE

Controversy in the industry is not confined to Lee. Tempe bar owners hired Andrew Chavez, head of Arizona Petition Partners, last fall when they set out to ease a smoking ban imposed by voters in that city earlier that year. County elections officials found in January that only about 60 percent of the signatures on the petitions were valid. This summer, a judge tossed several thousand signatures after the petitions were challenged in court. Now the county is examining each of the 17,635 signatures that remain in the pool.

While the county labors, yet another round of lawsuits has been filed arguing that some of the signatures that have been counted as valid shouldn’t be because the voters listed Tempe addresses that aren't residences, including businesses and parking lots.

Chavez said he was "very, very surprised" at the low validity rate on the Tempe petitions. Some of the circulators who were called into question on the Tempe petitions were hired by the bar owners who funded the petition drive, Chavez said. "They would not ever have been circulating for me," he said. "If we hadn't been involved there probably would have been a lot more problems."

Among the questioned circulators is Willie Mack Jr., who listed 813 W. Madison St., a mail drop for the homeless, as his address. Chavez testified in court this summer that he stopped turning in Mack's sheets after he became suspicious of the man.

He testified that Mack's petitions were, "well below average. Most of the petitions he turned in here were ineligible."

According to court records, Chavez pulled aside sheets notarized Nov. 18 and 22 because he suspected forgeries. Yet at least five sheets notarized Nov. 22, four sheets notarized Nov. 20 and eight sheets notarized Nov. 19 were submitted to the Tempe City Clerk’s Office, meaning somebody turned in the sheets after Chavez had begun to suspect that Mack was forging petitions.

Chavez said he gave the petitions to Rich Bank, the man funding the petition drive, to handle them. Bank said he submitted the petitions because he thought he was obliged to by law. Chavez said his company usually runs its own internal check on about 60 percent to 70 percent of the signatures gathered before it turns them in. He can't perform a background check on all circulators, so Chavez said he often relies on word-of-mouth to check a circulator's criminal history.

The Tempe drive is not the only one that has created problems for Chavez and his clients. Petitions circulated by his company last year to create a Scottsdale municipal fire department had to be circulated twice because the first batch had low validity rates.

Chavez said his circulators were pressed for time and couldn't come up with enough valid signatures on the first drive. In all, the firefighters union that financed the effort spent more than $280,000 to gather a little more than 83,000 signatures to put the Scottsdale fire issue on the ballot. That's an average of about $3.30 a signature.

Despite the delays with the Scottsdale and Tempe initiatives, Chavez said he has spent the last year narrowing his pool of circulators to people he has trained and can trust.

"It's always going to be considered a bottom-feeder industry," he said. "There are a lot of different steps we're doing here to make it a more reliable industry."

"PEOPLE ARE TRUSTING YOU"

Other petition companies that have been active in Arizona initiative drives have stringent requirements for their circulators and the petitions they turn in, according to the company owners.

Mike Crusa of the Phoenix-based Summit Group said he requires people who want to work for him to fill out an application, show documentation they are registered to vote in Arizona and provide a copy of their driver's license.

The Summit Group was the company responsible for getting Proposition 202, the gaming initiative sponsored by 17 Indian tribes, on the 2002 ballot. Much of the work was subcontracted to Lee and Chavez.

Crusa said he also has gone out to check addresses of his circulators to ensure they are not transients who travel from state to state to work petition drives.

On Proposition 202, Crusa said he did not turn in more than 12,000 signatures because of concerns they were not valid.

“People are trusting you,” Crusa said. “If somebody gets thrown off the ballot, the whole thing goes down the tubes because you didn't deliver. I take that responsibility seriously to make sure they are valid.”

Angelo Paparella, president of California-based Progressive Campaigns, the largest petition company in the country, said he has internal controls similar to those described by Crusa. Progressive was hired by backers of Proposition 201, the gaming initiative funded by horse and dog tracks in 2002.

Paparella said if his internal checkers suspect fraud, he will turn the petitions over to law enforcement agencies for investigation. He enlarges news articles about petition circulators who have been prosecuted for fraud and posts them on the wall of his office in what he calls a "scared-straight” warning.

“The petition companies are the ones that have the most incentive to catch fraud because our companies can only thrive on successfully qualifying initiatives,” Paparella said. “If we have a lot of fraudulent signatures, initiatives are not going to qualify. Initiatives don't qualify and we're out of business. So we have the biggest incentive in the world.”