The scandal described as the largest petition fraud in state history appears to heavily involve out-of-state workers lured to Nebraska by the promise of big money. 

Petition drives turned to workers with criminal records in some cases and firms that have faced previous accusations of fraud. Networks of contractors and subcontractors further obscured who, exactly, was handling the work. 

And as the cost of getting issues on the ballot continues to climb, the alleged fraud has placed fresh scrutiny on a system meant to give everyday Nebraskans a more direct say in governance, raising questions of whether existing laws have left the state vulnerable to bad actors. Campaign finance reports show statewide campaigns that circulated ballot petitions paid anywhere from $2 million to $5 million to hire firms. 

Yet for all the fraud allegations, all but one of the petitions under investigation will appear on the ballot anyway. 

“Anything that is political can get messy really quickly,” said Tammy Patrick, chief program officer for the Election Center, a nonprofit association for election administrators. “When it comes to petition circulating, that can be part of it.”

In Nebraska, citizens serve as the state’s “second house” – able to field petition drives and change state law, and the constitution, directly at the ballot box. Citizen-led initiatives have in recent years restricted abortion access, increased the minimum wage and legalized medical marijuana.

But this summer, a series of fraud arrests marred a local petition effort in Lincoln, and further allegations spread to four statewide petition drives and hit a candidate for governor’s signature effort.

So far, seven people have been arrested in connection to the alleged fraud. All are from out of state. 

Since their arrests, most of the accused circulators have bailed out of jail. Michael Smith, a 28-year old from St. Louis, charged in the case, said the whole situation stinks of corruption.

Dyandra Smith, his mother, described shock and confusion as armed law enforcement officers kicked in the door of their home in St. Louis. 

Dyandra Smith said she doesn’t understand why law enforcement is going after the circulators and not the organization who hired them. Lancaster County Sheriff’s Chief Deputy Ben Houchin, in his first press conference announcing the charges, emphasized that nothing in their investigation made them believe a political entity was working with the accused.

“All corruption of these organizations always starts at the top,” she said. “You don’t see corruption starting at the bottom, it starts at the top.”

Unfolding Investigations

On July 23, the Lancaster County Sheriff’s Office opened an investigation into more than 13,000 signatures on a series of local petitions championed by Good Government Lincoln, a conservative group aiming to amend the city’s charter. 

Then, a few weeks later, the Sheriff’s Office expanded its investigation to all four statewide citizen-led initiatives that circulated this year. Investigations by the Nebraska State Patrol, Douglas County Sheriff’s Office and Hall County Sheriff’s Office also are underway. 

“They can get up to $20 a signature,” Houchin told reporters when asked what motivated people to commit signature fraud. “You start doing the math on how many signatures there were, it could be up to $34-35,000 in two days.”

Those arrested so far gathered signatures for Good Government Lincoln’s petitions. Several also collected signatures for Brett Lindstrom’s bid to appear on the ballot as a nonpartisan candidate for governor, which failed after many signatures were found to be fraudulent. (Lindstrom later joined the new America First Party’s statewide ticket.) 

Jessica Flanagain, a partner at Axiom Strategies and consultant to Good Government Lincoln, said the campaign had many ways to guard against fraud, including “real time reporting, videos, geo location, in-person post-signature verification, handwriting review, secret shopper visits, etc.”

Flanagain acknowledged in a statement that when the arrests were announced, the campaign discovered one of the arrested was the verification manager on the effort.

“On a smaller project like this, that person can be a single point of failure,” she said. “We immediately sprang into action and recollected the city charter signatures and got them on the ballot.”

Barry Rubin, a consultant who has worked on a number of petition projects in Nebraska, said it’s important to ensure someone other than the petition firm or its employees is verifying signatures. 

“‘We didn’t know’ isn’t much of a compliance program,” he said. “… Having one person put eyes on the petition isn’t a compliance program.”

As part of its investigation into the alleged fraud, law enforcement is scrutinizing whether circulators purchased the Lancaster County voter files. The voter file released to the public has identifying information, including names, birthdates and addresses, which could be used to submit fraudulent signatures. 

A Flatwater records request for the complete list of who requested the Lancaster County voter file was denied in part, due to the ongoing investigation. 

It is common practice for firms and political consultants to request Nebraska voter rolls and use the information on those rolls to internally verify whether a circulator’s signature sheets appear legitimate. 

“The purchase of voting files, in and of itself, is not a crime,” Kelsey Cruz, public information officer for the Lancaster County Sheriff’s Office, said in a statement. “Investigators are focused on the circumstances surrounding the fraudulent signatures and any criminal activity associated with their collection and submission.”

Little Oversight

There are no licensing requirements for petition circulators operating in Nebraska. Vetting of circulators, when it occurs, is done by the petition firms that hire them.

Of those arrested, at least two appear to have past criminal convictions. During initial court hearings, prosecutors said that Jason Luciano had a 2013 stalking conviction in Utah, and Ryan McKinney had a burglary conviction in California.

The firms themselves often have a checkered history.

Vanguard Field Strategies, which worked as a contractor for both Fairness for Girls and Good Government Lincoln, was sued in Nevada after many of the signatures it gathered for a campaign in the state were flagged as potentially fraudulent by the Nevada Secretary of State’s Office. The parties in that case reached a private settlement before it went to trial.

And then companies like Vanguard often hire subcontractors, further undermining transparency. Campaign finance reports generally list the main firm but not subcontractors, all but guaranteeing that many of the companies actually working in Nebraska receive little scrutiny.

Vanguard tapped a petition firm called On The Ballot LLC as a subcontractor. The circulators already arrested on suspicion of  fraud were hired by On The Ballot.

“We trusted these individuals, we cared for them, and despite this, they chose to defraud us and our clients,” On The Ballot founder Jordan Brownstein said in a statement. “The fraud that was discovered is outrageous and the worst kind of dirty political tricks. It victimizes voters, the democratic process and the petition sponsors.”

Campaign finance reports for Tax Relief Nebraska, which circulated two sports betting petitions now under investigation, show the campaign hired two firms, FieldWorks LLC and Neilan Strategy Group. FieldWorks, which did not respond to requests for comment, pays hourly. The company was previously the subject of a class action lawsuit from former employees who alleged they were underpaid.

Perre Neilan, founder of Neilan Strategy Group, declined to comment on what subcontractors his firm had hired. A Flatwater Free Press review of online advertisements shows a number of other, smaller companies were recruiting circulators via Facebook for the sports betting petitions, promising free hotels and flights to so-called “heavy-hitters” able to collect upward of 250 signature sets in a week.

AI-generated recruitment ads promised would-be circulators they could make $9 to $11 per set of signatures, and upward of $1,000 per day. 

Respect Nebraska Voters, which circulated one of the petitions under investigation, hired Advanced Micro Targeting, or AMT, as its petition firm, according to campaign finance filings. The ballot petition was rejected from the November ballot by Secretary of State Bob Evnen.

Billy Rogers, AMT’s president and founder, said the company had not been contacted by law enforcement as of Aug. 31. He also said those arrested did not work as circulators for AMT.

AMT was previously the subject of an investigation by the Missouri Attorney General’s Office, which accused the company of hiring undocumented workers to act as circulators. Rogers denied those allegations.The company is also involved in active litigation against another firm, Let The Voters Decide, over allegations of poaching employees in Missouri. 

Signature ‘Bounties’

The petition scandal has revived a longstanding debate over whether allowing a pay-per-signature approach incentivizes fraud. On The Ballot, the subcontractor hired by Vanguard, pays per signature, and it appears that subcontractors for the sports betting petitions do, as well.

Gov. Jim Pillen has called on the Nebraska Legislature to revive a ban on pay-per-signature that was repealed in 2015, arguing the current “bounty” system encourages bad actors.

“The process of bounty signature gathering is sabotaging legitimate petition initiative efforts, it’s as simple as that,” Pillen said at a recent press conference. “Removing aggressive quotas would significantly reduce the flood of invalid and fraudulent signature collection efforts, primarily initiatives by folks hired from outside of the great state of Nebraska.”

Critics say while reducing fraud is a laudable goal, ending pay-per-signature will make it harder for grassroots efforts to succeed. They also have questioned whether Pillen is trying to make the petition process more difficult; several months before the fraud was uncovered, the governor said he doesn’t think petition initiatives are “how policy should be made.”

“Two things can be true at once: Some campaigns need to show a lot more responsibility in their operations, and also the Legislature got it right when it restored the option of commission-based payment for their circulators,” said Sam Petto, communications director at the ACLU of Nebraska. 

Crista Eggers, executive director of Nebraskans for Medical Marijuana, said it wouldn’t have been possible to pass the medical marijuana ballot initiatives without pay-per-signature. The campaign paid “super volunteers” $1 per signature.

“That was, to be honest, not enough even to put gas in their gas tanks,” Eggers said. “We did not have the type of money that it takes most petition drives to have to be successful.”

Paul McGreal, a professor of constitutional law at Creighton University, said the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that banning paid circulators is unconstitutional. But the court hasn’t ruled on whether it’s unconstitutional to ban paying per signature, specifically, leaving that discretion to district courts. 

“The legality of a restriction going forward is going to depend a lot on how the statute is crafted,” said Brandon Johnson, an assistant professor at the University of Nebraska College of Law. 

John Matsusaka, executive director of the University of Southern California’s Initiative and Referendum Institute, said signature fraud is a common issue for campaigns. It becomes tricky to determine whether restrictions on petitioning are earnest efforts to bring integrity to the process or are convenient attempts to make it harder for people to collect petitions.

“It’s hard to think that’s an accident,” Matsusaka said. “A lot of this happens in states where the government, whoever’s in control, doesn’t like ballot measures.”

The companies themselves disagree on whether paying by the signature is a good idea. 

Brownstein, the founder of On The Ballot, described bans on pay-per-signature as “backwards and archaic,” eliminating the ability for companies to compensate field staff based on their performance and driving costs through the roof.

Rogers, founder of AMT, said he would be amenable to Nebraska banning pay-per-signature. 

“We don’t do it because we think it encourages fraud,” he said. “Anytime you tell somebody ‘I’m going to give you $10 a signature,’ even with good people, the temptation is great to come in with 100 signatures and make $1,000 in a day.”

Both Evnen and Pillen floated other proposals beyond a ban on pay-per-signature, including a requirement that circulators complete training and be U.S. citizens. They also have stated they will support legislation to ban people with felony convictions from working as circulators in Nebraska.

Patrick, with the Election Center, said any discussion of additional functions and requirements to the state’s election system must also come with discussion of additional funding. 

“At the end of the day, the legislature or the appropriators need to decide how important the topic is, and then what resources they need to devote in order to wholly support what’s necessary to address the issue,” she said. 

Officials emphasized that Nebraska’s system worked correctly by catching this fraud.

“Here’s what I want Nebraskans to know today: We caught it,” Evnen said. “Our county election officials did their job and caught it.”

This story was originally published by Flatwater Free Press, an independent, nonprofit newsroom focused on investigations and feature stories in Nebraska that matter. Read the article at: https://flatwaterfreepress.org/big-money-a-big-draw-in-petition-drives-marred-by-circulator-fraud-allegations/