 |
 -0 |
 |
|
||||||||
 |
||||||||
 |
||||||||
|
||||||||
|
||||||||
 |
|
At a Dollar Per Signature, Recall Effort Is a Living But Gov. Gray Davis would have no beef with William Byrd from Seattle. "We need your help to protect the teachers," Byrd called to shoppers outside a Ralphs store in Hollywood. With that teaser, he handed anyone who listened the anti-recall petition circulated by the governor's backers. "We've got to stop the recall." Signers were surprised to learn that the man stumping for Davis on this sunny L.A. day hailed from the rainy Northwest. "The state of Washington?" said computer analyst Jeffrey Barnes, laughing ruefully. "That is very weird." The drive to remove Davis from office and the parallel effort to keep him there have depended largely on the mercenary, nomadic and legally murky world of paid petition circulators like Byrd. Most of the folks who have gathered signatures for and against Davis pocketed a dollar for every John Hancock, campaign officials said. And from the start, their ranks included a core of professionals who travel from state to state for petition work. These pen-wielding road warriors chase ballot initiatives across the country, just as fruit harvesters migrate with the seasons. The recall dust-up has yielded a bumper crop of cash. Each side is expected to spend more than $1 million on petition circulators, officials said. Recall advocates said they expect to garner enough valid signatures by next weekend — nearly 900,000 — to qualify the measure for the ballot. Davis allies said they have collected 1.1 million on their counter-petition, an unofficial document that has no legal weight but is meant to show public support for Davis. A chunk of the pro-recall budget has gone to Tom Bader, who was lured from Missouri to direct the paid petition effort. Bader, in turn, tapped Arizona petition coordinator Derrick Lee, who told of packing seven fellow Grand Canyon State residents onto a bus to canvass Orange County. "There's a lot of work out here," said Lee, who has set up shop with Bader in a worn office building next to John Wayne Airport. "There's always something going on." Nationwide, about 7 million voter signatures are collected in an average election cycle, 70% to 90% of them by paid circulators, according to petition companies and the Washington D.C.-based Initiative & Referendum Institute, a nonpartisan research group. * Traveling Contractors Institute President Dane Waters estimated that 5,000 people earn their living as signature gatherers, and perhaps 1,000 cross state lines for gigs. Employed as independent contractors, they ply precincts from here to Maine and from Oregon to Florida. It is unknown precisely how many have toiled on the recall campaign. Industry veterans placed the total number at 50 to 100, but said they can't be sure. The itinerants move in the margins of election laws, which usually require signature gatherers to be residents of the state where the petition is circulated. Those who collected signatures for the Davis recall also had to be registered voters in California. But legal definitions of residency vary by state and are often hazy at best. State and federal courts have muddled matters further by throwing out initiative statutes that imposed the registered-voter rule, declaring it a restriction of free speech. In any case, petition peddlers rarely find their residency status scrutinized by authorities. Nathan Barankin, a spokesman for the California attorney general's office, said he knew of no investigations triggered by the state's residency requirement. "Historically, it hasn't been enforced," he said.
Both camps in the recall battle — a political street brawl marked by screaming confrontations, defaced petitions and shoving matches outside Home Depots and Wal-Marts — say their opponents went too
|
|
|
