As Signatures Are Disqualified, Campaign to Hire More Police Cries Foul

With early numbers indicating that a Portland ballot initiative to hire additional police officers is falling shy of the valid signatures needed to place it on the November ballot, its backers on Monday leveled explosive allegations about political bias during the signature-counting process.

Safer Portland, the campaign behind the ballot initiative that would reroute 25% of revenue generated by the Portland Clean Energy Fund to hiring some 400 additional Portland police officers, released a slew of allegations on Monday against elections officials at both the city and Multnomah County.

The charges came as preliminary results, provided to WW by the Multnomah County Elections Division, show that the number of valid signatures gathered for the initiative is tracking below what’s needed to place it on the fall ballot.

The campaign earlier this month submitted a total of nearly 63,000 signatures to the city for verification, and the initiative needs a total of 40,437 verified signatures to secure a place on the ballot. After the city’s initial vetting excluded 7,478 of those signatures, the city transmitted a total of 55,837 to the county for sampling, according to Elections Division manager Deborah Scroggin.

But a Monday morning report from Multnomah County’s Elections Division, obtained by WW, shows that only 62% of signatures out of the first sample have been validated. That sample has not yet been counted in its entirety, so the preliminary results do not mean that the sample will necessarily fail—but it’s not a good indicator for the initiative. Any sample taken must contain at least 72% valid signatures.

As of 10 am on Monday morning, the Elections Division had counted 4,106 signatures from its first sample of roughly 5,500 signatures. 1,544 were rejected—or 38%.

“This number is flawed and inaccurate—we 100% disagree with it for all the reasons we stated in our release,” said Safer Portland spokeswoman Elise Haas.

As preliminary sampling results looked poor for the campaign, Safer Portland alleged in a Monday press release that elections officials at the city were tampering with the signature verification process and demanded that the Oregon Secretary of State’s Office intervene and conduct its own independent signature verification.

The campaign alleges that the City Elections Division “arbitrarily discarded 7,478 signatures—more than 11% of the count—without proper notification or documentation before they’ve even started verification.”

A memo penned by the campaign’s legal counsel, Tracey Frazier Wigglesworth, walks through what it calls “errors and violations” by elections officials and the city’s “blatant disregard for its role in protecting the rights of its citizens.”

Put simply, Wigglesworth contends that the city threw out far too many sheets of signatures, failed to properly inform the petitioners why sheets were being excluded, and then failed to keep a consistent tally with the county about the number of signatures being tested for validity.

Scroggin told WW in an email that city elections “rejected sheets and individual signatures as required by state elections rules” for reasons that include “insufficient circulator certification (issues with the signature or date), mismatching circulator signature (does not match voter registration record or exemplar given), and use of unapproved signature sheets.”

The campaign’s announcement that it is seeking a new count by the state includes a quote from Aaron Schmautz, president of the Portland Police Association—the largest financial backer of the initiative—charging that the purported irregularities look ”more like a culture of corruption and political bias inside a city election office hostile to police and opposed to this initiative.” The measure’s backers offered little concrete evidence to substantiate the allegations of political bias, but Schmautz, in an attempt to back up the claim, cited the recent actions of Susan Mottet, who runs the city’s Small Donor Elections program. Mottet recorded video of a signature-gatherer unable to supply the ballot’s full language to prospective signers. Mottet’s recording, alongside others, was submitted as evidence in a state elections complaint filed against the campaign. The Oregonian reported on Mottet’s role in the recording on Monday morning.

In the video, Mottet approaches a petitioner in a parking lot and asks what the petition is for. He replies: “We’re trying to reduce emergency response time in Portland.” (The initiative contains no language about reduced response times; it simply mandates hiring more police officers.) The canvasser cannot produce a copy of the full text of the ballot measure as required after Mottet asks for it, saying it is in his car.

Mottet then examines the canvasser’s signature sheet. She asks: “Is this where it takes the money out of the clean energy stuff?” He replies: “Yes. Trying to use the clean energy surcharge for safety.” Mottet then walks away from the canvasser, and the video ends.

Mottet told WW last week that there was a “clear separation between this and my official role,” adding that she recorded the video on her day off and in a personal capacity. “I openly and legally recorded a signature gatherer engaging in illegal activity that undermines the integrity of the ballot measure process,” she says. “These violations of election law that I—and many others—witnessed are alarming, and the government must take action on them.”

Whether Mottet’s role in the elections complaint conflicted with her official duties or not, she plays no role in validating signatures for ballot initiatives—and, in fact works, in a different city office, overseeing public campaign finance.

Responding to the allegations from the campaign, Scroggin said the City Elections Office has followed state law around signature verification and that it is “not aware of any uncorrected errors in the current process.”

“As per standard procedure, we maintain a record of the entire process,” Scroggin said. “We encourage patience with the process and will announce the results when they are ready, in accordance with the legal timeline.”

Tim Scott, the county’s Elections Director, said his division has followed state law is “committed to transparency and has shared reports of daily work with the petitioners.”

“As part of rigorous review and quality control procedures, the Elections Division conducts multiple reviews of data entry and signature verification work to ensure the accuracy of petition data in the petition module of the state’s centralized voter registration system,” Scott said. “These multiple rounds of review are standard and built into every verification process — to help ensure the integrity of the process, catch errors and take steps to remediate them."