The saga of phony signatures on ballot petitions of a candidate for U.S. Senate is progressing as it should, with an arrest and 34 felony charges against a woman who collected signatures. But what’s to prevent this sort of fraud from occurring in the future?
Not much, as it happens, and that needs to change.
The actual signatures on candidate petitions and citizen ballot initiatives are not verified by the secretary of state’s office when it checks to make sure the names represent eligible voters. And there’s good historical reason for this practice. Until about a decade ago, Colorado didn’t have a statewide voter database, let alone a comprehensive set of signatures on file.
In other words, officials couldn’t have verified petition signatures even if they’d wanted to. There was nothing to verify them against.
But that is no longer the case. Signature verification is possible today. The biggest obstacle now is the resources to conduct the comparison. And yet the magic of modern software may be able to keep the expense within reach.
The argument for signature verification goes beyond the phony entries on Jon Keyser’s petitions to get on the GOP primary ballot. Signature verification also protects genuine voters who make inadvertent minor mistakes in filling out a petition line and have their names disqualified even though their signatures would have been possible to confirm.
This is not a hypothetical concern. Several voters who signed Ryan Frazier’s petitions for the Republican ballot for U.S. Senate accidentally transposed numbers in their address. And while that is legal reason enough to boot them off a petition, such signatures obviously should be accepted if they can be matched to those in the voter file.
Former Secretary of State Scott Gessler argued in a legal brief on Frazier’s behalf that Colorado statute already gives the state the authority to verify signatures. He pointed to statutory language saying the secretary of state “shall review all petition information and verify the information against the registration records,” and “after review, the official shall notify the candidate of the number of valid signatures.”
Gessler told us that since “all” information includes the petition signatures and since “registration records” include voter signatures, you could argue the secretary of state is even obligated to compare signatures.
Gessler also adds that computer software exists — and is even owned by a few counties — that can drastically reduce the percentage of signatures that must be subjected to human inspection. That’s obviously critical for ballot petitions that might have 150,000 or more signatures.
To be sure, Gessler admits he never bothered to initiate signature comparison while he was in office. However, the recent debacle in which three of four GOP Senate candidates who petitioned onto the ballot were at first disqualified and then put on the ballot by a judge — one with what turned out to be forged signatures — is unprecedented.
Either the secretary of state or lawmakers should figure out what it would take to verify signatures on petitions and devise a plan to achieve that goal. Otherwise signature verification will remain a hit-or-miss project depending on the efforts of lawyers, journalists, activists and the private companies paid to collect them.
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