Political long shots pay per signature for ballot access. Why state officials want to end the practice

A high-profile legal battle involving the state elections board is illuminating long-simmering concerns over a practice used by long-shot candidates to get on the ballot in North Carolina: paying people to collect signatures.

Independent candidates and smaller parties, such as the liberal Green Party or the conservative Constitution Party, are required to collect thousands of signatures to get their candidates on the ballot in general elections in the state. And they regularly pay for consultants and individuals to collect them, often on a per-signature basis.

The practice is legal, but critics say it raises the risk of fraud—in large part because of the financial incentive. The risk of fraud only increases in a shaky economy. It’s a practice the North Carolina State Board of Elections itself wants to change.

“This practice incentivizes unscrupulous individuals to generate fake signatures for monetary reward,” Pat Gannon, a spokesman for the board, said in a statement. “The same incentive would not be in place if signature gatherers were paid hourly, for example.”

Before the next legislative session, the board is expected to recommend that lawmakers outlaw the practice of paying collectors by the signature. An ongoing fraud investigation related to signatures collected for the North Carolina Green Party has bolstered the board’s position.

Tangled efforts, fraud allegations, may keep Green Party off the ballot in NC

The elections board voted along party lines last month to deny the Green Party’s request to add candidates to the ballot, citing an investigation into potentially fraudulent signatures. Some of those signatures were collected by people who were paid per signature.

Opponents of the elections board’s efforts say prohibiting pay-per-signature could hinder access to broader representation on the ballot. Some even question the constitutionality of changing the law.

It takes 13,865 signatures this year for smaller political parties to put their candidates on the ballot in North Carolina. That’s 0.25% of voter turnout in the last gubernatorial election. And that percentage is the mark parties need to hit each election cycle if their candidate for governor or president didn’t get at least 2% of the vote in the last election, and if their presidential candidate is not on the ballot in at least 35 states.

To reach that threshold, candidates and parties often hire petitioners for signature drives. Party officials and consultants who do this work say an army of volunteers alone isn’t enough. It’s somewhere between difficult and impossible to get enough signatures without paying people, they say.

Like a majority of states, North Carolina allows political parties to pay collectors by the signature, and the Green Party paid between $3.50 and $4 per signature.

North Carolina elections officials say that outlawing the practice would align with other elections laws on the books. For instance, it’s already a crime in North Carolina to pay canvassers for every filled-out voter registration or absentee ballot request form that they collect.

Third-party officials on opposing sides of the political spectrum disagree. Paying people per signature can actually stymie fraud, they say, because they’re only paid for valid signatures, and there’s an expectation of professionalism.

“Why would someone want to do something that would cost them their job?” said Kevin Hayes, the Constitution Party of North Carolina’s ballot access coordinator.

It might also be unconstitutional to outlaw per-signature payments. Seven states have bans, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures, and five states have had their bans struck down by the courts.

And there’s a logistical concern: It costs double, sometimes triple, to pay people by the hour instead of per signature, increasing the burden for small, underfunded parties, said Richard Winger, editor of Ballot Access News, a California-based news website that tracks petitioning, ballot initiatives and ballot access.

“People will just goof off if they’re being paid by the hour,” Winger said. “Even professionals are subject to that, if they’re being paid by the hour.”

Winger said fraud is rare in petition drives, particularly for political parties seeking ballot access.

Much of that work is done by volunteers, supplemented by paid collectors, and “they’re just not motivated to commit fraud because it will disgrace the party” if they’re caught, Winger said.

But there are different ballot initiatives and third-party-ballot-access rules across the country. Some people travel from state to state running signature drives, and fraud does happen.

Five candidates for governor were removed from the ballot in Michigan this year after the submission of 68,000 invalid signatures, the highest volume Michigan’s Bureau of Elections had ever seen, according to a state report on alleged fraud.

Last month, police in that investigation raided the home of political consultant Shawn Wilmoth.

Wilmoth worked briefly for the Green Party in North Carolina, according to Hoh, the Senate candidate. On Friday, Wilmoth referred questions from WRAL News to his attorney, who didn’t immediately return a phone message.

Hoh said the party contracted with Wilmoth’s company, First Choice, around the first of the year to collect signatures in North Carolina. But the contract was canceled with a full refund because the group only submitted 109 signatures. The party then turned to Lee Evans, a consultant in Arkansas, who hired people to collect signatures for the Green Party’s petition here.

Hoh said Evans seemed to “do the work promptly and professionally,” but the contract was ended in early May and Evans offered to connect the party directly to the petitioners he’d hired. Three of them kept working for the party, Hoh said.

A month ago the party seemed to have enough signatures to run candidates in North Carolina’s November elections. Party officials turned in more than 22,500 signatures to county boards of election, which handle the first review. The counties validated 15,953, roughly 2,000 more than the party needed.

State officials say Green Party petitions contain similar signatures and that they’ve contacted people who say they never signed petitions. Some sheets are “identifiable to the two individuals,” Gannon said. Together they collected at least 1,271 signatures when working through Evans and another 1,381 working directly for the Green Party.

Gannon said many but not all of these signatures are from the 15,953 validated signatures, but determining exactly how many were among those initially approved “has been hindered by lack of cooperation in the investigation from signature gatherers and consultants.”

The issue is a key one: If they’re all from the universe of validated signatures, and they’re all thrown out, that would be enough to drop the party below the threshold for ballot access.

State election officials have also said that some of the Green Party’s petition pages include “deceased or long-removed voters,” and that some pages list the Green Party’s former chairman, indicating these are re-submissions from the party’s successful 2018 effort to get on the ballot.

Hoh has said repeatedly that the party did nothing wrong. He said party officials did what due diligence they could on the signatures turned in.

“This was not a scheme,” he said.

Winger, of Ballot Access News, said he knows of Evans and that he’s “done good work in other states.”

“I was kind of shocked [to hear his name in this],” Winger said. “I’m kind of shocked that he won’t testify.”

Winger also said that the North Carolina State Board of Elections’ decision to keep the Green Party off the ballot, at least for now, is “very, very rare.” County boards of elections typically review signatures, and for the state potentially to reject this many signatures “is almost unprecedented,” he said.

Gannon said the county boards reported “possible fraud” up to the state board, and that some of it is “blatantly obvious.”

“That is what is different this time,” Gannon said in an email. “This agency will not ignore obvious signs of fraud.”

The Elias firm has close ties to the Democratic Party, fueling concerns that the push to keep Greens off the ballot this year is an effort to keep Hoh’s far-left candidacy from pulling votes away from Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Cheri Beasley, who is running against Republican U.S. Rep. Ted Budd in what will likely be a close race that could ultimately decide control of the Senate.

Green Party officials received calls in recent months from people trying to convince petition signers to remove their names from those petitions. Those calls came after the Elias Group filed an open records request with the state elections board for petition documents identifying signers.

“That is a bad, bad, bad precedent,” said Hayes, of the right wing Constitution Party. “There’s already a hesitancy of people to sign a petition because they don’t want to be on some mailing list or be contacted.”

The Green Party has also suggested that the decision by the Democrat-controlled elections board to keep the Green Party off the ballot was politically motivated — an allegation that the board’s Democratic chairman, Damon Circosta, has denied. Circosta is also director of the A.J. Fletcher Foundation, which was started by the founder of Capitol Broadcasting Co., which owns WRAL. Capitol Broadcasting executives sit on the foundation’s board.

Hayes and others defend the practice of paying signature collectors per signature, but they’d like to see North Carolina ease its third-party ballot rules, potentially doing away with signature drives altogether.

Winder said that more states are moving away from petitions to setting a threshold for total party registrations. In South Carolina it takes 10,000 signatures, but just once. After that, the party needs only show that it’s organized, holding regular conventions and nominating candidates.

In Florida, political parties must simply show that they’re organized.

“And that isn’t subject to so much ambiguity,” Winger said. “That’s a lot easier on everybody. … Why go to all that extra work?”

North Carolina’s elections board hasn’t made this argument, but Executive Director Karen Brinson Bell said the reason county boards of elections didn’t all fully vet submitted signatures was that they were busy finalizing the state’s May primary elections. Hayes said the back-and-forth process of submitting signature pages is tedious, with paperwork going from the parties to as many as 100 counties, then back to the parties, then to the state.

WRAL News sought comment from the state legislature’s four elections committee co-chairs to see what, if any, third-party ballot access rules they felt should change in North Carolina. None responded, except for Sen. Ralph Hise, R-Mitchell, who did not address the question.