At least Larry Farnese had the decency to not use dead people in filling his petition for Vince Fumo's State Senate seat with fraudulent signatures. He just had living people forge multiple names on page after page.

From the same story:

But when Farnese submitted voter petitions last week to state election officials, a requirement for getting onto the April 22 primary ballot, hundreds of signatures were in the same handwriting - apparent forgeries....

Candidate John Dougherty, of the electricians union, sponsored a lawsuit yesterday challenging Farnese's petitions in Commonwealth Court.

Dougherty's attorney, Samuel C. Stretton, said that among multiple signatures in the same handwriting, signatures from people who aren't registered voters, bogus addresses at vacant lots and false affidavits from circulators, Farnese could be left with as few as 200 valid signatures.

I'm beginning to understand why Farnese chose to announce his candidacy in the 'Shambles!'

Is your buddy Guy a Democrat? If so, could you give us the date which he decided that?

Laurie it is a little unfair to not quote the entire section and leave out the section where it points out that both Lewis' and Payton's petitions got challenged.

Meanwhile, four people filed a lawsuit challenging Lewis's petitions.

Since Payton survived a ballot challenge 2 years ago while successfully challenging his opponent, as someone above the fray it would seem at least pretty likely that Payton would not have "unlearned" how to successfully file his paperwork in two short years. In fact if I were to hazard a guess its something I would expect Payton to handle pretty carefully considering his own history.

In terms of Farnese: well the print edition is quite a bit more interesting than the online one as it includes an image of some of Farnese's signatures that looks to my uneducated eye - well pretty damning. We are not talking about somebody accidentally signing who is not currently registered or out of the district. We are talking a solid page of blatantly, obviously forged signatures.

I really don't understand why a candidate in good faith would submit such patently fraudulent signatures. Those signature sheets are in fact legal documents and ultimately the people whose names are on those sheets are responsible for the content - which appears in this instance to at least be surprisingly amateurish.

I actually got a chance to see a couple of these sheets with my own eyes recently and I noted for example that on a couple of the sheets that were supposedly turned in by Farnese campaign manager Renee Gilinger that whoever signed for having collected the signatures was quite evidently unsure how many "e"-s there are in the word "Renee" writing it with one at first and then trying scribble over their error. Pretty bush league stuff.

Of course as always it will boil down to what the courts say and the testimony of handwriting experts to see how many are left after the ridiculously flagrant fraudulent signatures are removed but I have to say I am honestly kind of shocked at the level of the fraud.

-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.

Since seeing is believing, as they say, here's that petition filing with Rene Gil - er make that Renee Gilinger's "signature" on the affidavit section of the sheet.

There are more humorous highlights of um interestingly uniform signatures here.

-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.

that has an extra e added. And there is no legal requirement that the person collecting the signatures on the petition print his or her own name. It is quite common for other people to do that. In my own campaigns, I almost always asked someone else to do all the printing because my hand writing is so terrible.

This whole thread shows no understanding of just how difficult collecting signatures are and all the considerations that go into decididing what to submit and what not to submit. I always tried to make sure that staff members and I--in other words people I could trust--collected enough good signatures to get on the ballot but I also encouraged other people to collect signatures for me and, when I ran for council at large, just to be on the safe side I paid two people to collect a hundred or two extra signatures.

When you get back the petitions other people collected you always find bad signatures. Some are outside the district (which I found when I ran for state house). Some have been futzed with by a person evidently made mistakes and tried to correct them...for example, my administrative assistant when I ran for state rep noticed that some people put zip codes instead of dates on some of the petitions and corrected these errors. Some were illegitimately collected. When I ran for state rep an overeager volunteer collected signatures even though he wasn't a registered voter in the district.

What do you do with signatures or petitions you know are bad? When I ran for State Rep, I did not submit petitions I knew wer defective although I left petitions with bad signatures when some of them were good.

When I ran for Council, however, I had one or two (out of 40 or so) that I suspected were illegitimate. But I included them because I had discovered that whole process of adjudicating petitions is a little nutty. It is not as political as it used to be mostly because these cases go to Commonwealth Court not Common Pleas court. But it is crazy. Signatures get cut when they don't look like the signature on record. But people's signatures change over time and many people sign registration forms with the computerized machines at the DMV which produces a signature that looks little like a person's usual signatures. And some people--I'm one of them--have no regular signature at all. So a candidate can lose a lot of good signatures for utterly capricious reasons. And, in addition, you have the so-called handwriting experts make judgments that are based on, it seemed to me, voodoo. In 2004, a handwriting expert concluded that I had not signed certain petitions that I am absolutely and positively know I signed. (And why would I have to get someone else to sign them for me?)

Even the claim that one person filled out a whole set of signatures is not always clear. People tend to do what the people in front of them do. That's why when someone says no to a request to sign a petition, the best thing to do is to just stop for a moment or two before you ask the next person. People tend to write like the person before them on a petition. While real kitchen table jobs are usually easy to spot because there are five or six signatures in a row that all have an unusual handwriting. But sometimes a series of 2 or 3 lines can look quite similar even when they are done by different people.

On top of that, signatures and petitions can be challenged for reasons that are ultimately rejected by the court. But, in the meantime, because the rules are not always clear or applied uniformly--and because challenges brought at least by incumbents are treated seriously, you can be being dragged into court and can waste time and a great deal of money even if you ultimately win. In 2004 Rosita Youngblood kept me in court for a week or two by challenging hundreds of signatures and by claiming that there was no way I could have collected signatures on the 30 petitions I signed. These claims were rejected but I lost lots of time campaigning, my fundraising was undermined when it was not clear I would be on the ballot. If I had had to pay my lawyers--who were working for me pro bono--I would have been down about 10 to 20k.

So faced with some uncertaintly about whether a few petitions were really good when I ran for council I decided not to look at them closely and submit them, for the simple reason that the more signatures I submitted the less likely they would be challenged if only because it would take more time for other candidates to examine them.

So that's the advice I'd give any candidate. While I think candidates ought not to submit petitions that they know are faulty, I'm not going to criticize candidates who submit petitions when they are not sure. The first responsibility of a candidate is to get on the ballot and so long as we work within a system that is somewhat lunatic, candidates have to respond appropriately.

Nor would I criticize someone who mistakenly submits petitions that they know are bad, as Renee did. Think about what it is like in the last few days of the petitioning period. You are running around the district (or in my case city) picking up petitions, taking notaries to petition collectors, taking petition collectors to notaries, looking over the petitions as closely as you can to make sure you have enough good ones, xeroxing them, and so on and so forth. It is madness and no campaign gets it all right. (Last spring, I was furious at myself when I found out that a good petition had between two folders only to appear an hour after the deadline.)

I find it disheartening that people who call themselves progressives are nit-picking about a process that is so crazy. Last spring, the reform candidates got together and said they would not challenge other candidates on technical or irrelevant grounds. I think that is a good rule and I'd like to see the commentators follow it as well.

I tried but they were not large and distinct enough on my screen for my fifty year old eyes to tell whether there was any sign of fabrication.

But the petition posted here appeared much larger than those on Flickr and it was easy to tell that you and Mr. Luigi were not reading the one petition you posted here correctly. As I said, it wasn't Renee's signature that was botched, it was the printed name. And there is no law against that.

So, I can't say what Larry's petitions look like. I don't have a horse in that race and I'm not writing to vouch for them. I'm writing to explain to folks who haven't gone through the process just how difficult it is and how candidates decide what to include and what not.

And, while I'm not going to say you are wrong in your evaulation of Larry's petitions, given what you did get wrong, given that you misread my post as an attempt to defned larry's petitions, given that you are posting anonymously, and given that you are calling me disingenuous for no good reason, you don't have a lot of credibility with me.

collected by Eric Reid. It looks like there are a few places where two lines in a row were signed by the same person, usually with the same family name. This doesn't look like a wholly fraudulent kitchen table job to me. I can show you some petitions I've collected over the course of years where there are five or six lines signed by the same person or, in the case of Milton Street, a whole page all in the same handwriting,

What this looks like is a husband or wife saying, "I'll sign for my wire or husband, since they will want to support you, too." What do you do when someone volunteers to do that while you are collecting signatures? If I can catch someone before they start writing, I tell them not to do so. But if they go ahead and do it and then hand the petition back to me, I don't make a federal case about because I don't want to insult someone who supports me. But when I count how many signatures there are on the petition, I don't include them.

Maybe some of the five or six others posted (out of forty or more) are much worse, but I'm not going to make a career of examining Larry's petitions. I have not and will not endorse any candidate in Senate 1. I can't because of my job. So I don't want to be dragged into this dispute in a way that would seem like I'm taking sides. I'm not doing that. I'm just trying to explain to folks who have never done this work how complicated it is and how it is that someone might submit a petition with some serious problems without having any nefarious intention. I've been working to reform our politics longer than most people on our list. But I don't think that reform means setting expectations for individual candidates that are utterly unrealistic given the crazy system we have for getting on the ballot.

PS My point about people writing in ways that look a bit like the line before was less about the signature than about the rest of the line. And that really is where we look first when we similarity. You are right that this happens all the time when people make an error. One person writing a zip code and the whole page can be wrong before you know it. But I can show you some copies of pages I collected where there is a surprising similarity in lines. If you look closely at them...if you examine how some letters are formed...you will see that they were signed by different people. But on first look, there is a lot of similarity, esecially if all the folks used the same pen and the pen did not respond too much to different pressure. You can recognize kitchen table jobs when you find a letter that is a bit unusually formed and see that same formation on five or six lines in a row.

If someone wants to look at Larry's petitions in detail, that's what I would do. But it ain't going to be me, babe.

There are 5 sheets on the Flikr page. They all have the tell tale signs of gross signature fraud on them, at least as far as I can tell. Its not my Flikr account, I got forwarded a link from someone I assume to be supporting Dicker in this race, but as its John Dougherty's campaign that filed the legal challenge to the signatures, I may be wrong on that count.

From the DN

Candidate John Dougherty, of the electricians union, sponsored a lawsuit yesterday challenging Farnese's petitions in Commonwealth Court.

Dougherty's attorney, Samuel C. Stretton, said that among multiple signatures in the same handwriting, signatures from people who aren't registered voters, bogus addresses at vacant lots and false affidavits from circulators, Farnese could be left with as few as 200 valid signatures.

Dougherty did not return a call about the ballot challenge. A statement from spokesman Frank Keel described Farnese's petitions as "a blatant ethical lapse" and said the court challenge "represents our promise of bringing good governance and ethical stewardship back to the 1st District."

So someone, or more likely several someones, are going through those signatures very carefully.

As I understand it the signaturre challenge is a tough one to prove in court and has been pointed out the Farnese campaign is not lacking in funds or lawyers, including Farnese himself. I would asume that Dougherty would only invest in the challenge if he believed it to be likely to be succesful.

Does that sound about right?
-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.

I agree Milton Street's from last spring are a prime example. Unfortunately having looked at both I would put these examples from Farnese as every bit as bad.

I had mistakenly expected a higher ethical standard from Larry Farnese than I did from Milton Street. I guess I was wrong to have that expectation.
-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.

There is so much political blather on this - maybe the hyperventilating Doc folks should stay over at philly blog. I don't think highly charged attacks (FARNESE FRAUD!!!!) should have a place on this monitered site - unless proven in court if you like.

Every charge that is being thrown around - and some nasty childish stuff at that - could certainly be leveled at most of the candidates - not just those challenged.

Remember our own favorite candidate Tony Payton is being charged, thank goodness there's not a mob trial going on with him on here.

I hope everyone calms down, before this race gets really out of hand,

But I also believe in world peace and that ain't going so well.

AM

If everyone knows this process sucks... why not fix the process?

Maybe something like this.

1. All petitions from ALL candidates must be reviewed by "signature experts" (or whoever they use to do this for challenges). The cost of doing this is divided among candidates submitting them.
2. People who collect signatures must be held liable and are not paid until signature review is completed. If all or a portion of a petition sheet they collected is found to be forged, they don't get paid for it. This should put a damper on the kitchen tabling.

Am I the only one thinking this?

So none of the "THIS IS FRAUD" comments are not from partisan Doc folks - Uh - where did folks obtain copies of these petitions? Their corner store?? And to make comments like 'criminal charges' and 'this could excalate to more serious crimes' - all this based on what is being posted here?? - how in the world could one make an 'objective' opinion???

I love 'on line' Salem witch trials as much as the next person. BUT THIS IS DISGUSTING. Let's wait until someone, like a JUDGE, make a ruling. Instead of relying on 'hearsay' and other anonymous sources supposedly close to a campaign, oh yeah - the posting of selected petitions.

They are public documents, in a sense, but one needs to go to Harrisburg, sign in, and pay for copies of the petitions.

Did you personally do that? I hardly believe that - but who knows?

Ultimately, I really think all of our time is better spent planting flower bulbs than chasing anonymous charges and hearsay. Let's see what a Judge says.

See you in the garden.

1. Let the state hire an independent polling firm. And then do a poll with generally accepted procedures in each district a month before the election. Everyone who has more than 5 or 10% support in the poll gets to stay on the ballot.

Polling is not an exact science but, compared to handwriting analysis, it is quantum physics. While there would be an element of chance in the process, there is already an element of chance in the process we use now. And if the cutoff is low enough, then it really wouldn't matter much would it? Assume that the polling is done with a +/- of 3% at the 95% confidence level, then someone who polls 5% would have somewhere between 2 and 8% support. If you have less than 8% support a month before the election you have no chance to win.

Polling is expensive, but considering how much court time these petition challenges take up, this system might be a bargain.

2. One of the reasons we have so many candidates and so much fuss about who is on the ballot is that we have a plurality election system. In such a system who wins is very much shaped by who is on the ballot and candidates run other candidates to split the vote of their opponents.

So let's adopt a single transferable vote / instant runoff system and let everyone who wants to run for office do so if they are willing to pay a not insubstantial fee...say $500 or $1000.

And thanks to Dan for seconding my suggestion that we just top talking about the petitions of candidates and see who is on the ballot when the process is over.

If a candidate has the required number of good signatures and is on the ballot, then what happens during this utterly messy crazy process is not all that relevant. It is very hard to know who to blame when a bad petition goes in since volunteers and paid canvassers do a lot of the work and campaign managers don't have the time and resources to evaluate everything (or, as I have explained, much incentive to do so given that some many spurious challenges are made by party backed and / or well-heeled candidates.) It is very difficult to evalute the ethics of a candidate based upon what some of his paid and volunteer supporters have done. It is way too easy to make charges based on a selection of petitions filed on behalf of a candidate. And there is an enormous temptation in the heat of battle for supporters of one candidate to make wild claims against their opponents.

There are so many much more important issues, even issues surrounding campaigns and election, about which to be talking.

One other idea to stop people from gaming the system which I suggested earlier which everyone seemed to fly right by is to automatically have everyone's signatures automatically available on the web, similar to financial disclosure laws. I think that would do a lot to discourage both "short cuts" and frivolous challenges both by those with power and money and those without.

-Sean
MrLuigi, my cat, actually only types half as badly as I do.