STATE VERIFYING SIGNATURES
Sign of times: Colo. officials determined to prevent another stain on elections
State petitions and the voter signatures they require are getting a closer look for the next election season.
PUEBLO» Inside a secure, nondescript office building in Pueblo, a team of state officials spends 17 hours a day combing through voter data as part of a new effort to prevent election fraud.
The nerve center is responsible for verifying voter signatures that political candidates collect to qualify for the 2018 ballot in Colorado — a process corrupted by forgery and felony charges two years ago.
“This is all new,” said Secretary of State Wayne Williams, as he gave The Denver Post an exclusive tour of the facility. In prior elections, he continued, “there was zero checking done on the signature. This is the first year we’ve ever checked the signature component.”
The requirement is part of a 2017 law that came in response to forged signatures on petitions plagued the Republican primary for U.S. Senate and two ballot initiatives in 2016. The new rules build more confidence into the system and make it tougher for candidates to qualify for the ballot, but state officials acknowledge that holes in the system remain.
“We are trying to make it so it’s a better process,” said Williams, a Republican.
The process faces its first stress test this week as candidates for Congress, statewide offices, the legislature and others submit thousands of voter signatures ahead of the petition deadline Tuesday.
In Colorado, major-party candidates at this level can qualify for the ballot one of two ways: by collecting voter signatures on a petition or winning support through the party caucus.
The number of candidates this year who are taking the petition path is 50 percent greater than two years ago, according to the secretary of state’s office, because of numerous open political seats, new rules allowing unaffiliated voters to participate in the primary and lessons from 2016 about the unpredictability of the caucus route.
The caucus “is a group of folks that you can’t predict, and so I think that was proven out in 2016,” Williams said. “So I think candidates, being risk-averse, have said, ‘I’d rather have more control.’ ”
To collect voter signatures, campaigns typically canvass doorto-door or visit grocery stores and other populated public places to find support. A statewide candidate needs 1,500 valid signatures in each of the state’s seven congressional districts, but the totals for other political offices vary.
The verification process begins when the candidates submit their petitions.
Prior to 2018, the secretary of state’s office only verified that the
petition circulator met the legal requirements and that voters who signed their names were eligible to vote and belonged to the same political party as the candidate. A voter’s signature can only count for one candidate.
In 2016, the Republican candidates for U.S. Senate saw upward of 30 to 40 percent of their signatures disqualified by state officials.
Three candidates failed to make the ballot and filed lawsuits to correct a series of technical errors that spoiled some signatures. And in the case of former state Rep. Jon Keyser, a petition circulator working on behalf of his U.S. Senate campaign forged at least 34 voter signatures and later pleaded guilty to felony criminal charges.
Then and now, the petition circulators are required to sign a notarized affidavit verifying that they witnessed each signature, but state officials never checked the actual signature against the voter’s registration record.
“The circulator is testifying under oath that they are following this,” Williams said. “So historically, the state just accepted their sworn testimony.”
Two new steps
Under the new law, the state is validating each petition signature against the voter’s official record.
The secretary of state’s office contracts with Integrated Document Solutions, an agency within the Department of Personnel and Administration, to conduct the checks. The cost per hour is $46.99 to verify signatures, and officials said the total could reach as high as $100,000 this year.
The work takes place inside the IDS office near the Pueblo airport, where a few dozen employees sit at hexagon-shaped desks, working in two shifts that stretch from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m. as they move line by line through 5,000 to 8,000 signatures a day.
A new computer software program — which cost the state $550,000 to develop and use for five years — helps automate parts of the process once done by hand.
To confirm signatures, the software puts an image of the petition next to the official voter record for comparison. If an initial review can’t authenticate a match, it moves to two supervisors who received special training and represent different political parties.
It takes only one of the supervisors to approve a signature and two of them to disqualify. So far, the process is rejecting about 5 percent of the signatures submitted, compared with less than 1 percent invalidated on mail ballots during elections.
For disqualified signatures, the new law also gives campaigns five days to correct the deficiencies and resubmit without going to court, as required under the prior law.
A number of campaigns adapted to the rules and applauded the new system, even if it’s tougher to make the ballot.
“I think we were more stringent on making sure we had adequate petitions per congressional district,” said Craig Hughes, a Democratic consultant working with numerous statewide campaigns, including Mike Johnston, the first gubernatorial candidate to qualify through the new process.
To account for more disqualifications, Hughes said his campaigns collected more signatures than needed, to build “a bigger buffer than we otherwise would have.”
Ballot initiatives
The new steps make Williams confident that fraud is not part of the candidate qualification this year.
“When a candidate petition is approved for the ballot, then yes, we are confident because we checked the process, we checked the circulator and we’ve checked the actual signature of the voter,” he said.
But Williams is the first to acknowledge that an integrity gap remains for ballot initiatives.
In 2016, he said, potentially forged signatures appeared in petitions for ballot questions on a minimum wage hike and fracking restrictions.
But the new law did not require the state to verify each signature for initiatives, in part because it is too onerous, given that most submit more than 100,000 to qualify.
“For initiatives, without checking signatures, you can’t have that same level of confidence,” Williams said.
He believes the potential for criminal charges is a deterrent, but suggested more verification could come in the future.
“I wanted to see if we could make it work for the candidate signatures first,” he explained. “Depending on how well it works, that may be something we and the legislature revisit moving forward. First, we had to figure out can we do this.”