Bipartisan bill aimed at fraud on petitions

DENVER • The Colorado Legislature took aim at election fraud Tuesday, giving initial approval to a bipartisan bill intended to eliminate phony signatures on petitions for ballot measures.

HB1326, sponsored by Speaker of the House Terrance Carroll and Senate Majority Leader Brandon Shaffer, both Democrats, ups the threshold for citizens aiming to petition a proposal onto a state ballot.

The bill would call for more personal information of petition circulators, including names, addresses, phone numbers and e-mail addresses. It would also require circulators to be trained by the Secretary of State's Office and be paid an hourly wage instead of being paid by how many signatures they gather. It would invalidate any signatures gathered by unlicensed workers.

The bill would require all petitions to spell out their aim, and allow citizens who change their minds to pull their names off the petition after it is filed. To clarify the petition's intent, it would also change the label for constitutional amendments to "amendment" and changes in law to "proposition." Though that seems like a no-brainer, both are currently titled "initiative" on the Colorado ballot.

To protect law-abiding campaigns from political attacks, anyone who files a fraud complaint could wind up paying the defendant's legal fees. The bill would also shorten the deadline for pulling an initiative off the ballot from 60 days before an election to 33 days.

The measure was born after an allegation last fall by a labor coalition, Protect Colorado's Future, that a business group had skirted petition laws by using questionable signatures in its bid to place a measure on the ballot. The measure, known as Amendment 47, would have made Colorado a right-to-work state and banned mandatory union payments in union shops.

Some of the signatures submitted to qualify Amendment 47 for the ballot had ludicrous addresses, including one that listed a signer's residence as "I-25."

"This was a clear act of fraud," Carroll said.

Secretary of State Bernie Buescher, a Democrat, also argued that one of the most important aspects of the bill is the prohibition on paying petition circulators by the signature. For example, many are paid 75 cents to $1 per name, which Buescher said promotes fraud.

"One of the things that you hear when you're around this building is, you can put something on the ballot if you've got the money. We should just not accept that Colorado law is for sale," Buescher said.

Though the Democratic backers of the bill touted its bipartisan support and aimed attacks at the proponents of Amendment 47, one of the bill's Republican sponsors, Monument Rep. Amy Stephens, said there was just as much wrongdoing on the Democratic side.

"We see it as an ACORN cleanup bill," Stephens said, referring to widespread allegations of voter registration fraud by the liberal community group. Several activists were convicted of fraud in 2006.

The bill, which is being backed by business groups such as Colorado Concern, the Denver Metro Chamber of Commerce and the Colorado AFL-CIO, was approved unanimously and will now head to the House Appropriations Committee.