The 2022 election has seen its first major casualties, with two proposed initiated measures stumbling out of the gate. In the last month, Secretary of State Al Jaeger’s office has thrown out thousands of signatures for both petitions from Protect North Dakota’s Constitution and North Dakotans for Term Limits, keeping them off of the ballots this fall.

Protect North Dakota’s Constitution had sought to amend the North Dakota Constitution to raise the requirements for passing an initiated measure. It was determined by the Secretary of State that there were more than 5,000 signatures with issues, a shortfall that brought the petition well below the threshold of 31,164 required.

“People don’t give up their time in the way that they used to. You need to seek out networks, and start six to 12 months in advance, building infrastructure and ground work. You don’t actually have 52 weeks to get everything together. It’s hard to get signatures in -5-degree weather, with 12 inches of snow on the ground and power outages,” committee co-chairman Jeff Zarling said. “When you think about 31,000 plus signatures, and you are averaging about 15 to 20 per gatherer, you need around 1,550 people working. That’s why you engage with paid signature gatherers.”

His committee initially contracted a third-party company before electing to hire and manage their gatherers directly. With civic engagement diminishing in the COVID era, it has been difficult for such committees to get over the hump by relying solely on volunteer gatherers and the efforts of activists.

Both committees utilized paid workers, with North Dakota for Term Limits bringing on a third-party agency to hire and oversee the signature gathering. NDFTL submitted 46,366 signatures, well over the required amount. However, 29,101 of the submitted signatures were rejected by the Secretary of State’s office.

“There are always issues with every ballot initiative. Once your operation gets bigger, sometimes you don’t know you’re dealing with a bad egg,” said Jared Hendrix, committee chairman.

Hendrix said the committee itself had no direct involvement with the signature gathering process, relying wholly on the third-party company, Advanced Micro Targeting of Texas.

“The firm we contracted, they’ve worked in North Dakota. They know the law,” said Hendrix.

PNDC hoped that a more direct approach would help them mitigate such issues and concerns. Zarling’s committee was dead set on catching any fraud directly, tracking down suspicious signatories and verifying that it was in fact them who signed.

“When you have someone reporting 90-plus signatures a day it takes time to get a hold of verified physical copies of them,” Zarling said, “What do you do? You pull the gatherer, but by that time you could be a thousand signatures into fraud before you realize what is going on.”

Zarling said his committee had in fact caught multiple instances of fraud from paid signature gatherers they employed, and forwarded the information from each incident to the Secretary of State. It wasn’t enough to filter out all the instances of signature fraud that were discovered by Secretary of State Al Jaeger’s office.

“When we hire people, we tell them you cannot do this. This is a felony, do not do this. Even with that threat, they did it. They were not deterred,” Zarling said.

Election Specialist LeeAnn Oliver from the Secretary of State’s office said that such a flurry of rejections was unprecedented.

“I have seen three, in all my time here, this is the third rejection.” Oliver said, “You always run into a lack of understanding. You always have a husband or a wife who signs for their spouse because they think they would sign it if they could, or signatures from people out of state, especially around the Fargo area. You just throw those out.”

Oliver noted that such committees really can only compensate by getting more signatures, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they will be immune from further potential fraud polluting their numbers. Oliver indicated that while incidental issues are to be expected in the review process, the number of invalidated or fraudulent signatures that were discovered pushed both cases beyond the pale. The Secretary of State has forwarded information regarding both petitions to the Attorney General for further investigation.

Hendrix, his committee’s lawyers, and Advanced Micro Targeting had prepared rebuttals and were ready to provide verifications for some of the signatures in question, but Secretary Jaeger was unmoved by their overtures, officially announcing the matter closed with a letter of his own on May 12.

“Based upon the information I have from the Secretary of State, it seems there were serious problems with how they approached ours,” Hendrix said. “The accusations are not well founded.”

According to Hendrix, some of the rejected signatures are connected to a single notary, with thousands of signatures being invalidated due to an uneven and exclusive criterion evaluating this individual situation. Hendrix believes those signatures were thrown out on technicalities, which he says ultimately is a constitutional violation.

“They’re applying a different standard from one signature to another,” Hendrix said. “I’m not attacking the Secretary of State. We want to keep them accountable. It needs to be a two-way street.”

Zarling, however, rejects any notion that the Secretary himself or his office were an obstacle to his and other petitions getting on the ballot, saying the Secretary’s diligence protects the system from being corrupted. Zarling and his committee have no desire to dispute the Secretary of State’s decision. For them it begins and ends as a workforce issue.

“The difficulty is in finding good people to volunteer let alone hiring them. This kind of work isn’t an easy task,” Zarling said. “A majority of our signatories were from grass roots. Tens of thousands of people are disenfranchised by the actions of a few people. It’s disheartening and disappointing.”