June 12, 2004
State Accuses Petition Circulator Of Per-Signature Pay
Practice Would Violate 2002 Ballot Measure Adopted By Voters
We first saw this story via an OPB News item yesterday:
State officials are suing a petition circulator after a former employee complained her pay was based on how many signatures she turned in. But the firm collecting the signatures vehemently denies the charge.
The allegation was made against one Parker Bell, who (according to OPB) works for one Richard Burke, head of the Libertarian Party of Oregon and also "runs a company collecting signatures for a term limits initiative."
Today's Oregonian picks up where OPB left off, fleshing out some more of the story:
The charge stems from a complaint by a University of Oregon student whose hourly wage was reduced "when she did not obtain a required number of signatures," according to the notice of violation sent this week to petition circulator Parker Bell of Eugene.
In the OPB story, Burke denies the charges. In The Oregonian, Eric Winters (treasurer for the campaign) does so as well.
Interestingly, the OPB story specifically has Burke denying that any petioners were paid bonuses based upon the number of signatures collected. Unfortunately for Burke, there appears to be a problem here. According to The Oregonian that's not quite what's been alleged:
The charge stems from a complaint by a University of Oregon student whose hourly wage was reduced "when she did not obtain a required number of signatures," according to the notice of violation sent this week to petition circulator Parker Bell of Eugene.
So the question, then, is whether Burke is skirting the issue by denying a practice that isn't being alleged. The state isn't claiming that bonuses were paid for high signature counts, but that normal hourly pay was cut if gatherers collected too few signatures. If we take the OPB story at its word, this isn't what Burke denied.
For what it's worth, if the violation is proven (it's the first allegation of a violation of the provisions of the 2002 ballot measure prohibiting per-signature pay), Bell could be fined $2,500. According to The Oregonian, he has twenty days to respond to the allegations.
Also for what it's worth, according to this 2002 Northwest Labor Press story, Bell once worked for Bill Sizemore, who alleged that "Bell cheated him, charging him for more signatures than were delivered."
Comments (1)
ron on 14 Jun 2004
The pay per signature issue is premised on the rationale of preventing fraudulent signatures. If there are no bad signatures, just the pay issue, then there remains a latent free speech challenge to the validity of the prohibition.
The Sizemore stuff was based on fake signatures. That is not alleged here. The pay issue is not sufficiently narrowly tailored to discover fraud, let alone be conclusive of the existence of fraudulently obtained signatures.