Paid signature gatherers defend work Law on paid gathering has fluctuated

SEATTLE – David Jones works 12 hours a day, six days a week, giving rapid-fire sales pitches most people ignore. The ones who don’t ignore him sometimes curse him or question the motives of an initiative signature gatherer who’s paid for every name he adds to his clipboards.

“It can get pretty nasty,” Jones said one recent afternoon, sitting at a folding table outside Safeco Field as scores of people more interested in baseball than politics passed him by.

Jones has been gathering signatures part-time for about eight years, both in Washington and his home state of California. He’s done more of it this year, since he’s had to take time off from his bus-driving job because of a back injury.

He pulls in anywhere from 75 cents to $2 a signature, depending on the initiative. He doesn’t brag about his most lucrative days, saying he and his brethren have enough trouble dispelling the myth that they’re in it just for the money.

He does admit he can get more than 200 signatures on a good day. “Two dollars a signature – you do the math,” he quipped.

Working outside a recent Mariners game, Jones scored a paltry 12 signatures in an hour for Initiative 884, a 1 percent sales tax increase for education, and I-892, a measure to expand gambling and use the tax revenue to lower property taxes.

No one asked him whether he gets paid. And when they do, he says most people don’t seem to care and sign anyway.

But critics say paid petitioning cheapens the for-the-citizen, by-the-citizen ethic at the heart of the initiative system.

“I think they really hijack the whole system for profit. Most of them are carrying multiple petitions. Most of them don’t know a thing about the causes they’re promoting,” said Chris Dugovich, president of the Washington State Council of County and City Employees, an umbrella group for public employee unions unhappy with anti-tax initiatives voters have approved in recent years. “It’s just not a very healthy situation.”

Dugovich’s group spent about $75,000 on a statewide phone campaign warning voters that paid signature gatherers, many of whom have forgery convictions, could be identity thieves. Anti-tax crusader Tim Eyman cried foul, calling the campaign “despicable,” but the state Public Disclosure Commission rejected his complaint.

Carmine Alessandro, an itinerant signature gatherer from the Los Angeles area who splits his time between California and Washington, has a standard spiel for people who suggest he’s subverting the political process.

“Why is it wrong for me to be compensated for my time when all of your politicians are being compensated for their time?” he asks. “Usually people just accept that answer or just walk away disgruntled.”

Alessandro, who collects his Washington signatures in Spokane, got his start about 10 years ago after spotting a newspaper ad.

“The first couple days I said, ‘Wow! This is great!’ You really get to see the thinking and the mentality of the public out there,” he said. “That fascinated me.”

He’s made a career out of it ever since, making roughly $700 a week.

Bill Arno, vice president of Arno Political Consultants, a Sacramento-area company that runs paid signature-gathering campaigns in 26 states, says many of his independent contractors do quite well. But that’s not the point, Arno said.

“The initiative process is like the lobbyist for the public,” he said. “We are the last straw. We are the last resort people have to go to when they face gridlock.”

Those who defend paid-signature gatherers’ role in politics note it’s hardly a new phenomenon.

Sherry Bockwinkel, president of Washington Initiatives Now Inc., a Tacoma-based signature-gathering company, said that the first successful initiative to the Legislature – a measure that created public utility districts in 1928 – paid petitioners 10 cents a signature.

“If your idea is strong enough that it can garner financial support, that means you’re a player,” Bockwinkel said.

Charles Creso, a retired real estate agent from Tacoma, hasn’t earned a penny gathering more than 1,000 signatures for I-890, which would ban smoking in all indoor public places. It’s the first initiative he’s ever worked on, and he donates his time because he believes strongly in the cause.

He says people ask him whether he gets paid all the time, and that some people have even told him they don’t support his initiative, but they’ll sign his petition just because he’s a volunteer.

Most campaigns use a mix of volunteers and paid petitioners. And even some critics of paid signature gathering concede that the tight deadlines and enormous number of signatures required – nearly 200,000 this year – render it all but impossible for an initiative campaign to rely solely on volunteers.

“I acknowledge how incredibly hard it is to run an all-volunteer effort,” said Laura McClintock, the Western campaign director for the Washington, D.C.-based Ballot Initiative Strategy Center. “I think we should ask ourselves whether it should be easy to put initiatives on the ballot, especially initiatives that set policies and really tie the hands of the state for years to come.”

SEATTLE – Paid signature-gathering hasn’t always been allowed in Washington state.

The 1913 state law that implemented the voter-approved constitutional amendment authorizing initiatives included a ban on paying people to gather signatures. Except for a few years when challenges were being litigated, the ban was in effect until the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 1988 in a Colorado case that a blanket prohibition violates the First Amendment freedom of speech.

In 1993, state lawmakers tried a narrower approach, banning the practice of paying workers by the signature. That would have left open the possibility of putting solicitors on an hourly salary. State courts threw out the new law, citing the Colorado case.

Since then, most initiatives that have qualified for the ballot have used paid gatherers – including all five of the measures that appear headed for the November ballot.

Lawmakers also debated, but did not pass, a ban on paying solicitors by the hour and debated requiring workers to wear signs or lapel buttons telling would-be signers that they were paid and not volunteers.

Oregon has a constitutional amendment barring use of per-signature payments. So far, the courts haven’t overturned the ban. Former Secretary of State Ralph Munro, a longtime critic of the practice, says if the law sticks, Washington may try again.

“Paid signature-gathering has ruined the initiative process,” Munro says. “It’s so easy to buy your way onto the ballot. People have to really pay attention to sorting out what’s a good issue and what’s not. It’s scary.”