166 Days: The Anatomy of a Colorado Recall

Sometimes an accusation or circumstances surface during a news cycle and barely stir a reaction.

Maybe it sounds thin, or maybe it arrives when the accuser is already under scrutiny, making it easy to dismiss it as deflection or frustration.

​Or circumstances behind the scenes create the perfect storm.

The rest of the story eventually comes out. If not in headlines, then in a courtroom. My recall transpired between April and September of 2013. The paperwork to initiate the recall was filed on April 1, 2013. By June 18, the Secretary of State certified that enough valid signatures had been gathered. Ten days later, on June 28, there was evidence of enough fraud to expose it.

I made the accusation during this period of fraud while collecting signatures on the petition for my Senate recall.

With access to voter rolls, including names, parties, and addresses, it isn’t difficult to fabricate signatures for a petition like this. Unscrupulous petition signature collectors can pull out a voter list and retrieve information, particularly about voters aligned with or against you by party. Then the collector fills in a name and scribbles a signature that looks at least vaguely similar. Bam! Just like that the collector made $5 on that signature, a higher rate incentive given as the deadline for signatures approached over the typical $2 payout per signature. It’s fraud, and it happened to the voters in my Senate district in 2013.

Let me share some math with you. When I first ran for Senate in 2006, I personally knocked on about 8,000 doors and had nearly 3,000 conversations with voters. That took me seven months. So, I knocked on about 40 doors a day.

For the recall effort to gather 7,178 signatures in 60 days, they’d need to knock on about 18,600 doors. That’s 310 doors a day. So, roughly 7.75 volunteers a day are hitting 40 doors each day. That’s an impossible pace without paid help. So, they hired a professional firm and offered incentives. Payment per signature hardly qualifies as volunteerism.

Space doesn’t permit telling how fate played an even crueler hand in the process during those 166 days between the April 1 request to petition and the September 10 vote. The complications ran deep: mail-in voting—a big deal in voting practices in Colorado—was suddenly off the table. An appeal to the state Supreme Court followed, only to end in a tie when one justice, who was appointed by a Democrat, was out of the country and unable to cast a vote. The lower court’s ruling, therefore, stood. I recount those twists in fuller detail in my upcoming book The John Morse Code.

In January 2014, one of those signature gatherers pleaded guilty to signature fraud. A 21-year-old petition circulator working for Kennedy Enterprises, the company hired to gather signatures for the Morse recall, was later charged with forgery, perjury, and attempting to influence a public official. Even if 50 signatures, in this case, were invalidated (one astonishingly from a woman who had died two years earlier), the recall petition still exceeded the required number for a recall vote. Think about what would have happened if everyone committing signature fraud had been called to account.

But, by the time the total scope of the fraud could have been discovered and documented, I was long gone. Not unlike an NFL referee making a clearly bad call that cost one team the game, there’s no remedy. The team that should have won doesn’t.

When I came forward with allegations of fraud, some wanted to see justice. But, for a variety of reasons, many just felt uncomfortable (some because they were complicit). Others focused more on the disruption caused by my allegation than on the truth itself. This is how justice gets corrupted.

We can do better. We can handle early accusations with both care and clarity by saying what’s known, what’s alleged, and what’s still to be proven. Then follow up in a way that allows a determination before an election occurs.

The exposure of signature fraud could have weakened faith in democracy, but instead it affirmed that deceit is not left unchecked. Accountability ultimately prevailed even though I didn’t. As it was, the recall proponents only prevailed by a margin of 319 votes.

Even when the press or public overlooks the truth or moves onto the next headline screaming for attention, time and light on a subject eventually reveals the truth. That’s worth noticing. The system, for all its strain, did not look away. Every time citizens commit to honesty in civic life, we strengthen the very trust on which democracy rests. Truth, though often buried beneath noise or corruption, eventually surfaces.

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Notes:
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“Fraud alleged in Morse recall campaign”.
Alison Noon. The Gazette. June 28, 2013. 

“El Paso County DA charges man who gathered recall signatures with forgery.”
Megan Schrader. The Gazette. Jan. 10, 2014.

“Petition management firm used by Lamborn, Stapleton has Checkered Past.”
Rachel Riley. The Gazette. 04/11/2018.

​Wikipedia

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Published initially on Substack and Medium