By DON McINTOSH, Associate Editor

Oregon labor will start preparing in the months to come for a boatload of initiatives expected to appear on the November ballot.

Get ready for déjà vu. At least 10 initiative campaigns this year are sponsored by the same chief petitioners who have filled ballots in previous years — Bill Sizemore, Kevin Mannix, and Russ Walker. The campaigns have the same millionaire funders, and the same for-profit company is gathering their signatures — Democracy Direct, run by Sizemore associate Tim Trickey. And just like in years past, measures are headed for the ballot despite suspicions that the law was broken to get them there.

Staff members at Our Oregon, a union-funded group that monitors ballot measures, are convinced that laws intended to clean up the initiative process are being routinely broken.

In Oregon, the ballot initiative process is overseen by the secretary of state’s Elections Division. Our Oregon complained to that agency in December 2005 that Democracy Direct subcontractors were violating a voter-approved ban on the pay-by-the-signature bounty. Circulators were being paid in cash out of cars in some cases. In December 2007, the Oregon secretary of state fined two Democracy Direct subcontractors $10,900 each, and Trickey and Sizemore $250 each.

Fines of $250 are a slap on the wrist, said Our Oregon Executive Director Kevin Looper, and are little deterrent.

“I’m immensely frustrated that we’re facing as many ballot measures as we are, with really very little evidence that signatures have been collected within the intent of the law,” Looper said.

Staff at Our Oregon say the secretary of state’s 15-person Elections Division follows statutes, rules, and procedures to the letter, but seems to work on the presumption that signatures are valid.

Here’s how the process works. This year, 92,769 valid signatures are required to qualify a statutory measure, and 110,358 for a constitutional measure.When the initiatives’ chief petitioners think they have enough signatures to get on the ballot, they deliver boxes containing signed petition sheets to the Secretary of State’s office in Salem. Elections Division staff move quickly through the petition sheets, counting the signatures and looking to see if basic rules have been complied with, like whether someone signed the sheet swearing they witnessed all the signatures. Then staff randomly select 1,000 signatures, and send copies of the sheets to the 36 county elections offices. For each signature, county elections clerks see if there’s a voter registration card on file, and compare the signature to the one on the card. Signatures that don’t match don’t count toward qualifying the measure. If the measure fails to qualify based on that sample, a second random sample is generated in which 5 percent of the total signatures are checked.

But what if signatures in the samples match the ones on file because they were forged? Maybe a registered voter signed one petition, and then paid signature gatherers copied the signature onto other petition sheets.

Workers in Sizemore’s organizations did just that on several 2000 ballot measures, as revealed by a a civil lawsuit filed by the Oregon Education Association and American Federation of Teachers-Oregon. A forensic signature analyst demonstrated that Sizemore employees forged signatures, and the jury found Sizemore’s groups guilty of engaging in a pattern of criminal activity.

In 2002, the union-supported watchdog group Voter Education Project mailed copies of turned-in petitions to over 15,000 individuals whose signatures were selected for the random samples, asking them if they had signed the enclosed petitions — 198 wrote back saying they had not. The project’s efforts led to the convictions of several signature gatherers.

Our Oregon, the political successor to the Voter Education Project, keeps tabs on signature gathering efforts, and tries to observe election workers when they validate petitions. This year Our Oregon staff say they’re seeing some disturbing things. Whole sheets of signatures have all the address information filled out in the same handwriting. In some cases the filled-out information doesn’t appear to be same handwriting as the person who swears on the bottom of the sheet they are the circulator. On quite a few petition sheets, voter information appears to have been written using sheets of carbon paper. On one occasion, an Our Oregon observer pointed out sheets on which the signatures of one prolific circulator were obvious forgeries. These particular sheets were pulled by elections workers, but there was no investigation.

Mindful of the level of initiative fraud and abuse exposed in the past, union leaders have met with Secretary of State Bill Bradbury several times in the last year to plead for more vigorous enforcement.

“When the process is abused like it has been in the past, especially with Bill Sizemore, the voters of Oregon begin to question the process — and the job some of our state elected officials are doing,” said Oregon Education Association President Larry Wolf, who met with Bradbury.

“I would like to do more,” Bradbury told the NW Labor Press. “I’m not going to say we’ve done everything we could do.”

Bradbury said the Legislature hasn’t given his office the resources to police the initiative process. His office asked the Legislature to fund an investigator in 2003 and 2005, but not in 2007, when Democrats controlled both chambers.

As of now, no part of the initiative certification process is designed to detect signature forgery. There are no plans to look for fraud or forgery in the current batch of 1.2 million initiative signatures that are in boxes in the office basement. No government agency contacts voters to see if they signed petitions. The secretary of state has one staff person assigned to investigate initiative abuse, and he’s not looking for forgery. He’s doing criminal background checks on paid circulators and asking paid petitioners to show a badge they’re required to carry.

That requirement is one of several reforms contained in the Initiative Reform and Modernization Act, a law the Legislature passed last year to help crack down on lawlessness in the initiative industry.

The new law gives the secretary of state the right to demand payroll records to prove initiative campaigns aren’t paying by the signature. Bradbury was authorized to request payroll records when the law took effect in July, but didn’t ask for the records until Jan. 2.

“The goal was to give them enough time to have records to turn in,” said Scott Moore, spokesperson for the secretary of state.

A number of initiative campaigns failed to produce the requested records, so on Jan. 22 and 23, the Secretary of State’s office applied the one sanction it has under the law: It prohibited the campaigns from gathering more signatures until they comply. The prohibition may be meaningless for some initiative campaigns, because they’ve already turned in enough signatures to qualify. For several others, failure to comply may keep them off the ballot.

Come this fall, a lot of union resources will ride on which ones make it to the ballot and which ones don’t.