BILL WOULD OUTLAW PAID SIGNATURE GATHERERS
By Amy Lambiaso for the State House News Service
       Armed with stories about alleged voter fraud, lawmakers and advocates pushed Tuesday to change state laws to prevent groups from paying people to collect the signatures needed to get questions on the ballot and require photo identification at polling spots.
       Several legislative proposals being floated on Beacon Hill are intended to “uphold the integrity” of the elections process, lawmakers said, by
ensuring that people signing petitions understand the question presented
and are not coerced into adding their name to it.
       Massachusetts is one 24 states where citizens can place an initiative
petition on the ballot by collecting enough valid signatures. Three percent
of the voters who cast votes in the previous gubernatorial election must
sign a petition to advance to the ballot. Last year, 65,825 signatures were
required.
       But many say the process here is too regulated and difficult, and may often encourage voter fraud. A voter rights advocacy group, MassVOTE, plans to release a report Wednesday detailing instances of voter irregularity and voter fraud witnessed during the 2004 elections.
       Presenting dozens of signed affidavits from people claiming they were
coerced into signing a petition, Rep. Alice Wolf urged members of the
Election Laws Committee today to support her bill that would prevent people from being paid by the signature when collecting endorsers for a petition.
       “Financially compensating individuals on a per signature basis creates a strong incentive to mislead voters into signing their names or to add
signatures fraudulently,” Wolf told the committee. “There is ample evidence of this.”
Arline Isaacson, co-chair of the Gay and Lesbian Political Caucus, said her
group found more than 1,000 instances of alleged voter fraud conducted by an anti-gay marriage group trying to put a question on the ballot in 2001.   Paid signature gatherers intentionally lied about the intent of the question or lied about what the question actually was, she said. But because proving voter fraud is difficult, expensive and time consuming, Isaacson said the group was never stopped. Those instances are what Wolf and others are looking to prevent.
       Committee members, all of whom say they have collected signatures for their own campaigns, say people shouldn’t have to be paid for a cause they believe in. Rep. Patrick Natale (D-Woburn) called it ludicrous to pay
someone to collect signatures.
       “If your initiative is so important that you believe it should be on the
ballot, you shouldn’t have a problem finding volunteers to get signatures,”
Natale said.
       Opponents of the legislation say the process works well as it is now and shouldn’t be tampered with in ways that could discourage people from generating an initiative petition.
       “I don’t think you need to devise a law to deal with one or two instances” of voter fraud, said Chip Faulkner, associate director of Citizens for Limited Taxation, a group that has sponsored several ballot initiatives.
Faulkner said the only time CLT paid for signature gatherers was in 1999 in the wake of a court ruling that said any petition with extra or stray marks on it would be thrown out. He said voter fraud is an “aberration” that happens very seldom.
Committee co-chairman Sen. Edward Augustus (D-Worcester) said he believes there is a clear problem that needs to be addressed. “You say aberration, I say it’s something that’s gone on and may need to be corrected,” he said to Faulkner.
       Janet Domenitz, executive director of Massachusetts Public Interest
Research Group, also expressed her opposition to the bill, saying the
process for getting an initiative petition to the ballot is already one of
the most difficult to navigate in the country. She said Wolf’s bill is
“symbolic at best” at getting to the heart of voter fraud.
“I can’t see that it would do anything,” Domenitz said. “I don’t see this
as being an antidote to fraud.”
       Another bill debated today aimed at combating voter fraud would require voters to present a valid photo identification at the polling place. Rep. Michael Rush (D-West Roxbury) said putting names on voter lists without the person’s knowledge is a common thing in many cities, especially Boston, and undermines the integrity of the process.
       “The joke has been around for a while that if you had a cemetery in your district it would help you tremendously in an election,” Rush said,
referring to Boston. “The integrity of the system must be protected at all
times. If I go into a liquor store I have to prove this is me.”
Natale agreed that showing identification should be a requirement. “I can’t believe anybody would be against taking their driver’s license out to show who you are,” he said.
       Pamela Wilmot, executive director of Common Cause Massachusetts, opposes the additional requirement because she believes it will increase the time to cast a vote, result in many eligible voters being turned away from the polls, confuse and potentially anger the public, and not have the intended result of addressing voter fraud.
       As of 2003, she said, 11 states required additional proof at the polls,
with many state rejecting the additional requirement when proposed. Under the Help America Vote Act, voters were required to show photo
identification when voting for the first time last year.