Sizemore's anti-union initiative won't make it onto Oregon ballot

SALEM - Bill Sizemore's anti-union "paycheck deception" initiative was thrown off the ballot July 26 after falling 675 signatures short of qualifying.

Secretary of State Bill Bradbury ruled initially that Initiative 18 had enough valid signatures (125 more than the 89,048 that are required) to make it to the November election and designated it as Ballot Measure 21.

But a union-backed watchdog group called the Voter Education Project (VEP) challenged the validity of some of the petitions, claiming that at least six contract workers - paid by the signature by a firm Sizemore owns - forged and falsified many of the names. VEP turned over affidavits from 299 individuals who said they never signed the initiative.

VEP has been observing the questionable signature-gathering practices of the six petitioners over the past eight months. In fact, the group had submitted complaints with the secretary of state against each of them for forgery, fraud and/or misrepresentation between November 2001 and May 2002.

VEP asked Bradbury to set aside the questionable petitions until the signatures could be verified as valid. When he refused, VEP and several labor groups, including the Oregon AFL-CIO, went to court seeking a preliminary injunction to force the segregation of the petition sheets.

Marion County Circuit Court Judge Dennis Graves ruled that while there was evidence of forgery in some of the petition signatures, it was insufficient to prove that the signature gatherers did the forging themselves. His ruling came on the same day that Bradbury qualified I-18 to the ballot.

Undeterred, VEP continued to collect evidence of forgeries - enough so that county clerks in Marion and Douglas counties were able to verify more duplicate signatures than they had initially realized. Under the state's sampling procedure for counting signatures, the verification was enough to negate the initiative.

According to Oregon Council 75 of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees, Sizemore turned in a total of 139,628 signatures for I-18. He was one of only a few chief petitioners to turn in a batch of early signatures for verification about a month before the July 5 deadline. Of the 90,000 early signatures he submitted, fully 35 percent were found to be invalid, an extremely high rate, the council said.

Sizemore turned in 49,628 additional signatures by the deadline date. Those signatures were sampled separately. Second samples traditionally have a higher error rate than first samples because there is a smaller pool of potential signers to pull from, the council said. Therefore, Sizemore's second sample error rate was higher than 35 percent.

Saying the signature-gathering operation was "riddled with fraud and forgery," Oregon AFL-CIO President Tim Nesbitt added, "At least we're now certain that the petitions for the anti-union initiative don't reflect the will of the voters."

Sizemore is executive director of the anti-union Oregon Taxpayers United (OTU) and he was the Republican nominee for governor in 1998. He has twice failed to win voter approval of similar paycheck deception measures that appeared on ballots in 1998 and 2000 - both qualified under suspicion of false signatures.

In fact, Sizemore is currently preparing to defend himself in a lawsuit filed by the Oregon Education Association and American Federation of Teachers alleging that agents of OTU, the OTU-Education Foundation, and its political action committee violated the Oregon Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations by fraudulently gathering signatures that resulted in Ballot Measures 59, 91, 92 and 98.

Organized labor spent millions of dollars in time and money defeating those and other anti-union measures.

A trial has been set for Sept. 9 and, according to Richard Schwarz, executive director of AFT-Oregon, Sizemore is without an attorney because his counsel, Gregory Byrne, resigned because he had not been paid.

Like I-18, Sizemore's earlier measures were aimed at keeping unions out of politics by limiting union-dues deductions for political purposes unless members signed annual authorization cards.

Sizemore said he will appeal the secretary of state's ruling.

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