D.C. mayoral candidate Linda Cropp’s campaign paid petitioners $1 for every signature they collected to get her name on the ballot, a practice that landed current Mayor Anthony Williams in trouble four years ago.
Paying signature-gatherers by the amount of names they collect is legal in D.C., but election watchdogs argue that it encourages fraud and many states ban the practice. Williams was fined more than $250,000 in 2002 because many of the signatures he paid for turned out to be fake.
Mayoral candidates were required to collect the signatures of 2,000 registered voters by Wednesday in order to get on the Sept. 12 primary ballot.
Marshall Brown, a campaign consultant for the Cropp campaign, told The Examiner that he paid about nine people $1 for each signature that they collected. He said they collected about eight percent, or about 1,200, of the 15,000 signatures that the campaign gathered as a whole.
Brown and Cropp campaign spokesman Ron Eckstein said the practice has being going on in the District for decades and accused the opposing campaigns of Adrian Fenty and Marie Johns of doing the same.
“That’s a lie,” said Johns spokeswoman Liz Rose. Fenty and Johns campaign said only volunteers and paid staff collected signatures.
“We caught them and now they’re desperate,” Fenty campaign Alec Evans said. Evans said their campaign learned of the practice from one of Cropp’s signature-collectors.
Eckstein said the Cropp campaign verified the first 4,000 signatures against the voter rolls to make sure all were registered in D.C.
In 2002, Mayor Williams turned in thousands of fake signatures and failed to qualify for the Democratic primary. He had collected 10,000 and 9,000 were challenged. Williams then launched a write-in campaign to win the nomination.
SIGNATURES
» Lobbyist Michael Brown collected more than 2,000.
» Council Chairman Linda Cropp reported 15,000.
» Council Member Adrian Fenty collected 21,500.
» Marie Johns, a retired Verizon executive, collected 10,000.
» Council Member Vincent Orange Sr. collected nearly 6,000.
