Getting big dogs, fraud and errors out of Colo. ballot access

Let’s recount the fun of the Republican showdown to get on the Colorado primary ballot in 2016 for U.S. Senate: one meme-inducing video, three court challenges, nine deaths by caucus and 34 felony forgery charges.

Despite efforts at the General Assembly to address the issues that cropped up last year, the pressures on candidates and ballot questions qualifying for the ballot is only likely to intensify in 2018.

A veritable horde of candidates are rushing down both sides of the aisle toward the governor’s mansion, and there will likely be a number of ballot questions relying on signatures again, too.

There are two ways for statewide candidates to get their names on the primary ballot. The first is to go to a party’s state assembly and win at least 30 percent of the delegates’ vote. In 2016, only one candidate for Senate, out of 10, remained standing after the GOP assembly in Colorado Springs.

The second option is to petition onto the ballot. A year ago, Senate candidates needed 10,500 signatures from valid registered Colorado voters from their party. Petitioning on is typically considered the safe, but expensive, route: a statewide candidate can pay around $200,000 for a company to gather signatures; only a handful of prospects have ever done the collecting with volunteers.

Last year, while expensive, it was anything but safe and easy.

Four candidates who tried to petition on were plagued with ineptitude from signature gatherers who were paid per signature, and in one case forged signatures. In other cases workers failed to do simple things like sign and date the petitions in front of a notary. Then there were issues with both the voter registration records of those signing the petition — wrong party, wrong address, they were dead — and the registration records of those gathering the signatures.

Three of the four candidates landed in emergency court hearings, with attorneys trying to validate enough signatures that had been cast out by the secretary of state’s office. The cases went right down to the wire, but eventually all four candidates got on the ballot, a far better success rate than the caucus route.

It was a costly and embarrassing mess for the candidates. Perhaps worth noting, the primary winner went the assembly route and avoided the signature-gathering hassle.

This year, state lawmakers tried to come up with a solution. Only one idea has stuck so far.

House Bill 1088 — which is headed to the governor, who is reportedly likely to sign it — would require signature verification and allow candidates to remedy small errors before signatures get tossed out. The secretary of state will use voter signatures already retained in a database for ballot-verification purposes to verify signatures on petitions. No longer would the job fall to reporters like Mitchell — I mean Marshall — Zelinger, the former Channel 7 investigative reporter who chased down the fraudulent signatures that were included on candidate Jon Keyser’s petition. Keyser memorably botched Zelinger’s name, refused to answer the reporter’s questions about the signatures and instead issued a vague threat involving the size of his dog.

Bringing the bill are the fatherand-son duo Sen. Tim Neville and Rep. Patrick Neville. Of note, Tim Neville was one of the nine candidates knocked out in the caucus process for the U.S. Senate race.

The bill is a good idea. In fact, it’s remarkable that signature verification wasn’t a part of the process before, but technology has caught up to make it relatively easy for the secretary of state to verify the required random sample of signatures.

It’s also likely the bill will make it more expensive and more difficult for candidates to get on the ballot. Given that most petition gatherers were paid per signature, there is a huge financial incentive to cheat. But the increased threat, under HB 1088, of getting caught should be enough to dissuade cheats — the petition gatherer in Keyser’s case pleaded guilty to two counts of felony forgery.

Beginning in 2020 under HB 1088, signature verification would also be required for ballot issues, increasingly Colorado’s preferred way of passing laws.