The lunchtime rush crowd streaming through Vendor’s Row avoids Bennie Jordan like an 8 a.m. class. He holds a large clipboard in his hand, the paper only half-full with scrawled signatures and addresses. Jordan watches the flow of traffic arc to avoid him. One young man even jogs a little to escape Jordan’s proffered clipboard. He shakes his head.
“They’ve got to realize what we do,” Jordan said. “We’re just the messengers.”
Specifically, Jordan is the messenger for ballot initiative I-1105, which would privatize the sale of liquor in Washington state. That’s not the only one- his open backpack bristles with clipboards. 1-1098, I-1068, and I-1077 spill over the zipper. Jordan is a professional signature gatherer, or “circulator,” and the month of June is his equivalent of a lunchtime rush.
Petitioning season peaked this month before the July 2 filing deadline for Initiatives to the People, or signature-driven proposals to create or change Washington state law. There are 57 active ballot initiatives, according to the Washington Secretary of State’s website. Each needs 241,153 valid signatures to make it to the November ballot.
Enter Bennie Jordan. He and his brother Dave Jones and niece Mija Jones travelled from California to Washington for the ballot initiative season. Jordan said they’ve visited nearly every urban center, university, and college in Washington.
“Well, you don’t set up a table on a country road, do you?” Jordan said. “We’re headed to Colorado next.”
However, petitions are not the grassroots, folksy political vehicles they once were, according Dave Ammons, Communications Director for the Secretary of State. Jordan and his family are waged signature-gatherers, paid $1 to $6 per name depending on the initiative. He is employed by an industry that Ammons said makes this political process into a commercial venture.
“It’s a new, modern phenomenon in Washington,” Ammons said. “For many years, grassroots organizations were the way you got on the ballot. For about that last 20 years, all the successful campaigns have used paid signature-gatherers. It’s become a professional industry.”
Washington state banned paid signature gathering in 1914, but the ban was overturned in 1988 by a Supreme Court case, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures website. Since then, Washington state legislature and Secretaries of State have tried to reinstate the ban, said Ammons. Every attempt, he said, is rebuffed by courts who classify paid signature gathering as “free political speech.”
Progressives originally created the initiative process and the petition as a means of bypassing powerful and wealthy interests in government, according to Jennie Bowser. Bowser is a an election policy expert for the National Conference of State Legislatures. The petition was intended to give citizens more power through direct democracy, Bowser said.
“It’s become an avenue for the same moneyed interests it was created to avoid,” Bowser said. “The process has become a business.”
Initiative I-1105, the petition that Jordan hawked on Vendor’s Row, is sponsored by the Odom Corporation and Los Angeles-based Young’s Market Company. Costco backs the I-1100 campaign, a competing liquor privatization initiative. Costco’s sponsorship of I-1100 has been so effective that it was the first campaign to file their petition on June 23, according to the Bellingham Herald.
Jordan is the last link in this chain of funding. Of the $400,000 poured into the I-1105 campaign by Odom Corp. and Young’s Market Company, Jordan will receive about $3 per signature. This is a relatively high commission, according to Philip Dawdy, Campaign Director for Sensible Washington I-1096, an initiative to essentially legalize marijuana. The I-1105 initiative started its campaign late, Dawdy said, so it incentivizes signatures to a greater degree.
“I-1105 and I-1107 started late. The campaigns hired 200 ‘recognized superstars from California, [to petition]’” Dawdy said. “They’re mad dogs. They’re animals. You would be too if you were getting $3 to $3.50 per signature.”
The I-1107 “Sin Tax” initiative, which aims to end recent state taxes on soda, candy, and bottled water, is financed by the American Beverage Association. The Seattle Times reported that the Washington, D.C.-based association gave more than $1 million to the campaign, which began a mere two weeks before the July 2 filing date.
“We hear the I-1107 campaign is paying five or six dollars per signature,” said Sandeep Kaushik, spokesperson for the Yes to I-1098 campaign.
This is the advantage of paid circulators versus volunteers, said Dawdy. His own campaign uses only volunteers, who he said sometimes walk away with petitions without turning them in. Unlike volunteers, waged circulators bring in a higher quantity of signatures at a faster rate.
“They can make $60,000 to $100,000 a year,” Dawdy said. “And most of them don’t have the equivalent of a high school education.”
The ratio of waged to volunteers petitioners varies, according to Kaushik. His organization hired Progressive Campaigns, one of the several signature vending firms that Jordan’s family works for.
“As you get closer to the turn-in date, you use more paid signature-gatherers,” Kaushik said. “I would say we will use more than a 100,000 volunteer signatures.”
The remaining one-third of needed signatures is the domain of signature vendors. Jordan has worked for such firms for 19 years, beginning just after the Supreme Court ruling. Now his family travels with him, all three working as paid petitioners. According to Dawdy, this itinerant lifestyle is common of most career signature-gatherers.
“They’re circuit riders,” Dawdy said. “They’re like circuit-riding preachers from the 1800s.”
Circuit-riders perhaps, but Jordan said that above all he is a skilled worker. He and his family select petitions that will be of greatest appeal to a target audience. Sociology and demographics are essential for meeting their quota, Jordan’s niece Mija Jones said.
Pointing to a young man in a baseball cap, Jones said she would approach him with a petition relating to alcohol. For a studious looking young woman, Jones pushes I-1098, which would increase education funding through increased taxation.
“Different strokes for different folks,” Jones said, shrugging.
Jordan also said that socioeconomics determines what petitions they carry on a particular day.
“Any petitioners that come up [to Bellingham] have to be informed, because people are going to ask you questions,” Jordan said. “In a lower class neighborhood, they ask fewer questions, which can be good. We’re not here to argue. But the flip side is, a lot of people in those neighborhoods aren’t registered to vote.”
However, experience and skill like Jordan’s and Jones’s are not free. Their wages are part of the $70,000 to $100,000 average cost of getting a measure on the ballot, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. An increased reliance on waged circulators is one of the central factors in the rising cost of qualifying an initiative, said the organization’s website.
In addition to rising campaign costs, fraud and low transparency are also associated with paid signature gathering, Bowser said. Circulators are tempted by high commissions, and may forge signatures by going through the phonebook and copying names and addresses, Bowser said. Another forgery method, according to Bowser, is to put a carbon copy sheet under one petition and transfer those signatures to completely different petition. Tracking an initiative’s financing, Bowser said, is also challenging.
“It’s difficult because when it comes to signature-gathering, the laws aren’t the same as with candidate elections,” Bowser said. “There’s not a timely disclosure of who’s paying for what. So in some cases, you may not find out who is financing a campaign until after the initiative has already qualified. There’s a long trail you have to follow to find the money. It’s detective work.”
Washington state received an F grade for process oversight standards and fraud enforcement on the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center’s Ballot Integrity Report Card For example, the report said that there is no “specific statutory penalty for a campaign committee that has knowingly encouraged the violation of state signature gathering laws.”
“It’s a pretty byzantine world, I’m finding out,” said Dawdy.
For Jordan, he said he sees his job as a civic service, not solely as a source of income.
“Some people put that stereotype on us,” Jordan said. “But just because we get paid doesn’t mean we don’t care. Not everyone who has a petition is a bad person. I’ve been doing this for 19 years, and lately it’s gotten out of hand. But you just need to be proactive, and find out what’s really going on.”
Jordan, Jones, and Jones wrapped up their Washington tour this week. They plan to circulate in Colorado before the state’s August 2 initiative filing deadline.
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