AURORA | State election officials want to do a better job at rooting out forged and invalid petition signatures. The only thing stopping them, for now, is the law.
Judd Choate, state election director in the Secretary of State’s office, addressed an array of questions Thursday, May 19, over the petition process after U.S. Senate candidate Jon Keyer’s campaign became embroiled in a controversy over forged signatures discovered on his petitions.
One signature in particular — that of Judy DeSantis, who died in January — was found on Keyser’s petition, dated March 28. An elections worker was notified of the anomaly in April, but the issue was not brought to the attention of Secretary of State Wayne Williams until Tuesday, May 17.
“Under state law we are permitted to evaluate the content of a signature … we are not permitted under state law to compare signatures,” Choate told reporters, explaining that the reporting procedures at the time did not call for checking the date of the signature against the date of the voter’s death.
“We would have no reason to believe they have done anything wrong here,” Choate said, later adding that “the assumption was that they had died after signing the petition.”
The Secretary of State’s office receives notifications of deaths monthly from two separate sources: the Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment and the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC), which includes the Social Security Administration’s death list, which includes both in-state deaths and deaths of Colorado residents out of state.
“From now on, the ballot access team will go back and look at the date of death,” Choate said.
As to the larger issue of signature verification, Choate said that his office is prohibited by law from taking that step while some county elections officials — such as those in Denver — have implemented signature verification under their county charters.
“It would require a change in law, we would need a statutory change … we have very, very limited authority to pursue someone for a violation like this,” Choate said.
Secretary of State spokeswoman Lynn Bartels added that the office does not have criminal prosecutorial authority. The forgery complaints to date have been referred to the Denver and Jefferson County district attorneys, respectively.
Beyond a change in the law, Choate also pointed out that signature verification would require “substantially more time than we currently use to analyze” signatures. In the case of petition signatures for this year’s U.S. Senate candidates, the office reviewed about 100,000 signatures in 25 days. Even more effort is likely to go into petition review for ballot issue petitions, wherein about 900,000 signatures will be reviewed in 30 days.
He did not provide an estimate of what it would cost for the elections office to institute such a change.
Choate said Williams and his office hope to have “a general review of the statute” this summer to consider changes to the law that would then be proposed in the next legislative session. While not calling for specific actions, Choate mentioned the use of out-of-state petition circulators and the practice of paying them per signature as possible areas that could have adverse impacts on the petition process.
“That may have had an effect on something like this,” Choate said.
While state elections officials don’t believe there are rampant issues with signature forgeries, Choate did not shy away from criticism of the office’s handling of the matter.
“We’re very concerned about it, but we have no evidence that it’s a common occurrence … in this particular circumstance, we could have done better,” he said.
CORRECTION: An earlier version of this story misidentified the group which provides the Secretary of State’s office with the Social Security Administration’s death list. The organization is the Electronic Registration Information Center (ERIC). We regret the error and apologize for any inconvenience.