At a Dollar Per Signature, Recall Effort Is a Living

If California’s chief executive faces a recall election, he could pile some blame on a newly transplanted Missourian and a bunch of bused-in Arizonans.

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.

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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 far in their use of imported hired guns.

Davis representatives say Lee’s Arizona posse committed fraud by registering to vote here. Recall proponents deny that, while noting that the vast majority of their petition carriers are locals. They also contend that some out-of-staters they did recruit were snatched away by the Davis crowd.

That’s what happened to Byrd, a personable, fast-talking 31-year-old who dabbles in commercial fishing when not trolling for names. He said he trekked down from Seattle at the invitation of the Republicans targeting Davis, then jumped the fence a week later.

Byrd said he switched mainly because he’s a Democrat, although he added that the Davis job was more lucrative. “It’s been pretty easy too,” he said.

What made it easy is the anti-recall petition’s informal nature. It merely expresses an opinion and cannot thwart an election. Unlike the recall petition, it could be circulated by non-residents and signed by anyone, even minors.

“You can be 8 years old,” said Byrd, who bagged eight signatures in his first 20 minutes at the Ralphs.

He said he considers himself a bona fide resident of California, where he has gathered signatures off and on for seven years. Several weeks ago, he said, he registered to vote, using a Pomona hotel as an address -- “the worst I’ve ever stayed in, $40 a night” -- and has since moved to a Hollywood hostel.

Byrd’s story is fairly typical for his breed of circulator. The rovers tend to be free-spirited, possessed of a casual employment history and saddled by few domestic responsibilities, such as young children or a mortgage. They can gross $800 to $3,000 a week, according to the petition firms.

Close to home or not, signature gatherers aren’t necessarily choosy about the political causes they help advance. They have been known to simultaneously circulate petitions for and against a given issue or officeholder, and the California recall fight proved no exception.

“I’ll work on anything,” said John Mitchell, 55, a San Diego resident who has gathered signatures since 1985. He handled both the pro- and anti-recall petitions.

“They’re self-serving mercenaries,” said Bill Arno, co-owner of Arno Political Consultants in Sacramento, one of four major petition companies in California. “Most people don’t realize there’s this core of professionals. Without them, it would be a rare occurrence for an initiative to qualify for the ballot.”

Like many of his California competitors, Arno does much of his business outside the Golden State. The four California firms are among the top half-dozen or so in the country. Pro-Davis forces signed up all of them to try to fend off the recall.

Their dominance is a reflection of the state’s quarter-century run as a hothouse for initiative crusades, ranging from 1978’s tax-cutting Proposition 13 to 1990s measures that rolled back affirmation action programs and restricted bilingual education.

“I’ve done Arizona, Arkansas, Nevada, Michigan,” said Fred Kimball, owner of Kimball Petition Management in Westlake Village. His late father was a pioneer of the modern petitioning-for-profit business.

“Some of these professional circulators can make a fortune,” Kimball said.

Bader and Lee, the recall petition managers, said they haven’t made a fortune from the campaign, but they aren’t doing badly either. Lee gets a fraction of a dollar for each signature collected in Orange County; Bader, who was enlisted in April by recall leader Ted Costa, is paid another fraction for names culled statewide.

Earlier in their careers, Bader and Lee lived and worked in California. They said they intend to establish permanent operations here. Because they don’t solicit signatures directly, they do not have to be residents of the state for their current assignment.

“My wife and I have rented a house here,” said Bader, a wiry, intense 47-year-old who was chain-chugging coffee. “We’ve been planning to move back to California.”

His second-floor office, a dingy-white affair with a view of the Orange County airport, was stacked with shipping boxes. In the next room, 10 employees were hunched at computer terminals, spot-checking signatures against voter rolls.

Lee, 38, was hunkered in a closet-sized warren down the hall, cutting checks for signature gatherers who filed in with armloads of petitions.

“This stuff is bad, dude,” he said to a local gatherer who had turned in a petition riddled with names of unregistered voters. No dollars for them.

In Hollywood, Larry Laws had a similar problem. He flipped through 50 pages of an anti-recall petition that was filled with forged signatures -- the handwriting and pen pressure identical from line to line.

“People try to hand in this garbage all the time,” said Laws, 46, a petition coordinator who has labored in more states than he can remember. “It’s my job to catch them. If I don’t, it comes out of my pocket.”

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Hustling Life

Laws and his single-name girlfriend, Cairo, live in Hollywood, but will journey to Massachusetts, Florida, Texas -- just about any state where they can make at least $1,000 a week each. They also sell spatulas and wrinkle creams at fairs and do a little credit card marketing.

“It’s all about whether you can hustle or not,” said Cairo, an actress who has had bit parts on television. She balks at revealing her age. “I’m in the entertainment industry, so I know how to hustle.”

She and Laws swapped war stories with Byrd, one of 60 circulators they hired for the anti-recall campaign. The three sat outside a Starbucks, across from the Ralphs where Byrd was preparing to work, his cardboard-backed petitions at the ready.

“I was registered in five states but voted in none,” said Laws, who was dressed in baggy clothes and sneakers, the occupation’s uniform.

Byrd, an African American, told of being taunted with racial slurs while working on a Mississippi initiative. “I walked home crying,” he said. “That’s the last time I ever took anything personally.”

Cairo recounted her trespassing arrest in Ohio for gathering signatures at a street festival. “I was on the sidewalk!” she said, eyes wide with outrage.

The conversation never strayed far from money.

“We’re making a difference,” Laws said of signature gatherers’ contribution to the political process. “We’ll watch the newspaper and follow whether or not our initiative has passed.”

He paused, then snickered: “Of course, it’s partly because if it doesn’t pass, we’ll be back to do it again .... Easy money.”