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February 09, 2007

Maybe Pay-Per-Signature is a Bad Idea After All

I just managed to get a copy of a transcript of last week's hearing on the initiative process, including testimony from Labor Secretary Dan Gardner, Ellen Lowe (lobbyist and advocate), Bill Sizemore (initiative meister), Tim Trickey (right-wing petitioning company owner), and Ted Blaszak (left-wing petitioning company owner). It was really quite interesting reading. I thought all gave compelling testimony. I also noticed that some members of the committee were disinclined to pay any heed to anything Sizemore had to say – and some of it was very interesting.

One of his more interesting statements was - are you ready for this? - "I have never intentionally broken the law." I was also interested in how he introduced himself: "I am the executive director of Oregon Taxpayers United." Last I heard, he tried to get around a legal judgment by changing the group's name to Oregon Taxpayers Union. I guess when that didn't work, he must have reverted back to the original name.

All snarkiness aside, for the record, I agree with Sizemore's views on ballot title shopping and the proposed legislation to curb it – in fact, he makes a far more persuasive case for it now than he did six years ago. I also agree strongly with the comments he made about the excessive disqualification of signatures – something I believe not only disenfranchises people, but also is a backdoor effort to increase the number of signatures required to qualify for the ballot. But the more I hear about the petitioning process and how the "lefties" are doing it, the more I disagree with Sizemore on the pay-per-signature issue. I think, perhaps, the voters may have been right after all when they passed Measure 36, which required petitioners to be paid by the hour rather than by the signature.

Sizemore's first argument against the concept of paying for signature collecting was that it is more expensive to collect signatures using volunteers than it is to collect them using paid signature gatherers. He pointed to the 2000 election, in which he says he placed six constitutional amendments on the ballot for $65,000 to $85,000 each, while Phil Kiesling, using volunteers, spent $101,000 to place a statutory amendment (which requires a third fewer signatures) on the ballot. Sizemore says that if legislators want to "get the money out of the initiative process," then they should require the use of paid petitioners. Go ahead and chuckle; it's okay.

It is true that using paid petitioners under the rules in effect in 2000 would be less expensive, but even the figures Sizemore cites are misleading. The racketeering trial revealed that his petitioning company received at least $200,000 under the table during the initiative drives ($175,000 came from phony "stock purchases" by Robert Randall; a significant further amount came from Americans for Tax Reform). Whether that money went into Sizemore's own pocket as salary or paid for signatures, I do not know, because it was never reported – even I, as the person filing the contribution and expenditure reports, did not know about that money until the trial. But either way it should be added to the figures he cited, bringing the cost per petition up at least $30,000 more than he claimed. Additionally, when someone runs a single petition, all the overhead costs accrue to that one petition. But when you are running six petitions of your own and several more for others, your per-petition administrative costs drop dramatically and you can get away with paying your signature gatherers significantly less money per signature than if they were only carrying a single petition. The reason is that if someone stops to sign one petition, they'll likely sign others that you are carrying, too.

All of this has changed, of course, now that signature gatherers must be paid by the hour. The administrative costs involved in processing payroll and overseeing the workers, as well as other employer costs, are much greater than in the old days, when people were independent contractors who simply sold signatures to the chief petitioner. Today it could conceivably be less expensive to use volunteers – provided your measure has enough popular support. Of course, paying for signature gathering is protected by the Oregon Constitution, so it isn't going away, and I personally don't have a problem with it.

Speaking of popular support, I found it humorous that Sizemore tried to claim Measure 36 wasn't a good example for validity rates because the group putting it on the ballot had collected so many more signatures than they needed that they could go through them and throw out all those that were questionable without jeopardizing their chances of making the ballot. I was surprised to hear that they had collected so many signatures, because they did so in a mere six weeks. Sizemore will typically spend many months collecting signatures on his petitions. Apparently, the public really, really wanted to reform the process. Also, one wonders if this doesn't mean Sizemore knowingly turns in questionable signatures …

Based on what I have read, the difference between Sizemore and Trickey's signature gathering operation and Blaszak's operation is rather stark. I can only guess what Sizemore and Trickey are doing, but it appears to me to be an amalgam between the old pay-per-signature system and the new pay-by-the-hour system. Based on what I have read, I would guess that they are having a good deal of difficulty trying to comply with the new law specifically because they want to hold to the old system as much as they possibly can, and they're trying to merely modify it in order to make it lawful. Blaszak, on the other hand, is treating petitioning like any other job. His employees arrive in the morning, punch in, have a brief meeting, are assigned petitioning locations, go out to do their work, come back in to punch out in the evening, and earn a certain hourly wage. They get raises for experience and performance, just like at every other job. And they successfully get measures on the ballot. It's so much cleaner and simpler.

Sizemore would say that the professional signature gatherers from around the country who come to Oregon will stop coming here if they are treated more like employees, circulating only the petitions for which they are being paid by their primary employer, because they can't make enough money. I don't really have a problem with that even though I don't look down on the petitioning profession. If following a more normal employment process means out-of-staters who don't know about Oregon and don't really care stop coming here to gather signatures, and instead Oregon college students, true believers, and people who are unemployed can find a job for awhile earning a living wage doing something they believe in, then I'm all for it. Sure, it makes it harder for a chief petitioner to raise enough money to run more than one or two petitions an election cycle, but since most ballot measures are being rejected by the voters these days anyway, I think that is just fine. I think Oregonians are ready to see ballot measures narrowed down to the most urgent, popular issues.

In the end, if fundraising is a problem for people like Sizemore because their sugar daddies keep dying off on them, perhaps the answer is for them to build a true, broad grassroots group all over the state – one that can, by sending you $10, $25, or $50 at a time and a lot of volunteer signatures, get its issues on the ballot without the $100,000 checks from Dick Wendt and Loren Parks.

Posted by Becky at February 9, 2007 09:59 AM