Tuohey's TABOR Team: A Fraud Many Times Over

On May 5th at 1:55pm, a young woman who works in St. Louis for a non-profit advocacy organization stopped at the Wal-Mart on Kirkwood Rd. in suburban St. Louis County. What she saw there struck her as a perversion of the democratic process and caused her to take note. Two young, attractive twenty-something individuals --a man and woman, he in khaki slacks and red shirt, she in khakis and a black North Face jacket-- sat near the entrance to the store. The young woman wrote to relay what she saw in her own words:

As soon as I arrived they left. They were offering free Aquafina for signatures. When I arrived the young male and female were sitting at a table located next to the front door. They had a huge sign reading 'free Aquafina' and two coolers that they were giving free water out of, after people signed the petitions.

These folks --engaged in the purchase of petition signatures strictly prohibited under law-- were soliciting signatures from shoppers on behalf of 'Missourians in Charge' and National Voter Outreach. Their goal: to get initiatives regarding eminent domain and TABOR on this November's ballot.

A Conspiracy of Ideologues

First thing’s first: no matter what you read in the paper, there is no such 'group' as Missourians in Charge.

Rather there is a man named Patrick Tuohey –a pollster from suburban Washington DC who moved to Kansas City little more than a year ago—with a campaign finance committee. Missourians in Charge, a name copped unabashedly from the national entity which provides the strategy for his scheme --Citizens in Charge, is merely a shell organization for which the media-savvy Tuohey serves as huckster-in-chief.

Bankrolled by millionaire New York developer/national Libertarian Party bigwig Howie Rich, quarterbacked by national strategist and president of Citizens in Charge Paul Jacob, and staffed by a mercenary army known as National Voter Outreach, Tuohey's front group undertook Missouri ballot initiative efforts using a multitude of fraudulent methods and legally questionable tactics. In surveying the "work" done here by this cabal over the past two months, the question that naturally arises is not how their slipshod initiatives wound up tossed from Missouri's ballot, but rather how their carnie-style operation was tolerated in our state at all.

The Front

Few moments in the brief and contrived history of Missourians in Charge were more telling than the question and answer session that Patrick Tuohey spent with the media following the frantic and haphazard submission of his petition signatures to the Secretary of State at a few minutes before the 5pm deadline on May 7th.

After Tuohey gave the media a carefully crafted statement, he was asked a few simple questions about the signature gathering process. Since the initiative petition process in Missouri requires that petitioners gather signatures in six of the state's nine Congressional districts, Tuohey was asked the reasonable question of which districts his petitions were circulated in. It was at that moment that Tuohey --previously engaged in spirited spin-- looked for a lifeline from the assembled group of paid circulators and advisors who accompanied him to the submission.

The man from whom he solicited the answer (Congressional Districts 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, and 9) had up until that moment tried to secret himself away in the crowd. But with his mouthpiece standing in the lights grasping for an answer, national initiative petition schemer Paul Jacob had little choice but to step out from behind the curtain and toss his man a rope.

If Tuohey is the shiny package that the TABOR initiative came wrapped in, Paul Jacob is the brain and guts tucked away inside. Jacob, a national libertarian operative and pundit for conservative outlets like TownHall.org, sits at the controls of the Missouri TABOR initiative by virtue of his position at a national organization called Americans for Limited Government. He has run these ballot campaigns before in other states. These facts contribute to the perverse truth that Paul Jacob --who lives on the outskirts of the Washington DC metro area in Woodbridge, Virginia-- pulls the strings for the ironically named Missourians in Charge.

A Fraud in the Funding

Fired Up Missouri reported first --and the mainstream media has followed by reporting widely-- that New York developer Howard Rich is the financier of activity by "front group" --Missourians in Charge. But unexplored until now has been the fact that the funding mechanisms used to finance the signature collection operation for Missourians in Charge directly contravene Missouri's campaign finance and reporting laws.

Reports filed with the Missouri Ethics Commission by Missourians in Charge indicate what we already know: that a committee called Fund for Democracy gave more than $1.35 million between January and May 2006. As was explained in a previous post, Fund for Democracy is the committee vehicle through which Howard Rich moved a small fortune into the Missourians in Charge effort. The reports explicitly recognize Fund for Democracy as a "committee" that is domiciled at 73 Spring Street in New York City.

Chapter 130 of the Revised Statutes of Missouri lays out the state's campaign finance disclosure law, and portions of that law are helpfully abstracted on the Ethics Commission website. Interestingly, the Ethics Commission document lays out some law applicable in the current circumstance. Notably:

The out of state committee shall file reports with the Missouri Ethics Commission if the committee makes contributions or expenditures in support of or in opposition to candidates or ballot measures in a Missouri election or makes contributions to any committee domiciled in this state. ...

No candidate or committee in Missouri may accept any contribution made by any committee domiciled outside of Missouri unless the reporting provisions of the law pertaining to an out-of-state committee are met.

For the geographically challenged, New York City is not located in Missouri. Nevertheless, the Fund for Democracy (an out-of-state committee) has never filed a form S3 report or a Statement of Committee Organization --both of which the law requires of them. So our campaign finance law has been summarily ignored, by Fund for Democracy via its failure to disclose properly AND by Missourians in Charge for accepting a contribution from an out-of-state committee which has failed to comply with the law.

How disturbing that a small group of out-of-state ideologues with such obvious disdain and disregard for our state's laws think it appropriate to spend millions of dollars trying to stain our Constitution.

Also worth noting is that an Idaho group called America at Its Best kicked $190,000 into the Missourians in Charge effort. An AP story succinctly summed up this outfit:

“America at its Best” is run by Duncan Scott, a former Republican state senator from New Mexico who once sponsored a bill there to require a psychologist testifying at a defendant’s competency hearing to wear a two-foot-tall cone-shaped hat imprinted with stars or lightning bolts.

The bill was killed.

Unsurprisingly, this band of crackpots also thumbed its nose at Missouri's campaign finance law and failed to file proper disclosure reports with the Ethics Commission.

Footsoldiers and Forgers

While Howie Rich paid, Paul Jacob planned, and Patrick Tuohey preened, it was another out of state entity called National Voter Outreach (NVO) that brought professional circulators to Missouri's streets to gather signatures for several initiatives, including TABOR. For collecting signatures, NVO was paid the princely sum of $1,514,796.50 by the TABOR proponents.

So what does a cool $1.5 million get you when you hire NVO? Largely, it got Missourians in Charge the assistance of a corps of petition circulators, some of them with disreputable backgrounds and many of whom constitute a sort of professional circulator circuit which sees them bounce from state to state to collect signatures for cash. In other words, it buys you the counsel of an operation with a documented history of malfeasance and fraud.

In 1998, NVO was the firm hired by a former Miami mayor to try to gather enough signatures to force a special mayoral election. The results were disastrous --for the former mayor and for NVO's reputation:

Florida Department of Law Enforcement agents seized the entire petition, which bears 20,243 signatures. Two FDLE agents carted out the originals along with a stack of copies.

The company Suarez had hired to collect the signatures said it warned him that the petition was fraught with problems and suggested he delay submitting it. ...

But Howard Rosen, a Miami-Dade assistant state attorney who signed the subpoena for the petitions, indicated that his office has begun a fraud investigation.

At least six people whose names are on the petition told The Herald that their signatures were forged. Others who signed said they were misled by petition workers about the campaign's purpose.

One petition gatherer is being investigated for allegedly telling voters that they had to sign in order to vote.

In addition to having been investigated for fraud in connection with these petitions, the signatures that NVO did collect were found to be invalid at startlingly high rate:

Suarez should not have been surprised by Leahy's decision, said Rick Arnold, chief executive officer with National Voter Outreach, the Nevada company Suarez hired to collect the signatures.

"Eight weeks ago we told Suarez we had a rate of ballots that were invalid," Arnold said. "It was around 40 percent."

Patricia Tucker, an Outreach processing manager, said she inspected more than 900 signatures submitted by the Suarez campaign and found problems.

Suarez acknowledged talking to Tucker, but did not recall a specific warning about problems. He also noted that the company "guaranteed a 70 percent validity rate."

Leahy's rejection came after he examined the fourth batch of 100 signatures chosen at random. Of the 400, Leahy found 174 -- 43.5 percent -- invalid, and 226 -- 56.5 percent -- valid.

This was hardly an isolated incident for NVO, as Nevada recall petition effort left in NVO's hands that same year met a similar fate. The Las Vegas Review Journal described why that effort was a failure:

Bennion said the petition signatures were collected by National Voter Outreach, a Carson City-based professional petition-gathering organization. Company executive Rick Arnold said his workers checked the signatures on recall petitions against signatures on voter registration records.

"We believe we have far more than 4,380 valid signatures," Arnold said. "We have plenty of signatures."

But Heller said the random check of 503 signatures found 130 belonged to people who are not registered voters. An additional 91 were names of people who do not live in Atkinson Gates' district. Twenty-one names were rejected because the writing was illegible, and 17 were rejected because the writing did not match that on registration forms.

One possible reason for why NVO is targeted by fraud investigations and regularly submits petitions with abnormally high rates of invalid signatures is that they apparently exercise very little discretion with regard to hiring subcontractors for their campaigns:

National Voter Outreach, owned by Susan Johnson, hired a subcontractor in southeastern Michigan to gather signatures for the Stop Overspending Michigan campaign. Upon an internal review of some of the signatures, the company found some of the subcontractors turned in fraudulent signatures, including those of deceased individuals, according to the police report.

The fraud was noticed out of the Flint office, Johnson said. Some people on the circulating crews “turned in several thousand forged signatures” while the people managing the crew went to Missouri to work on another drive.

And, of course, NVO was only too happy to blame the St. Charles Police Department when Missouri business owners requested that NVO's petitioners leave their storefronts and parking lots. Given what we already know about the TABOR proponents' respect for the law, it's pretty clear where the smart money sits on who was in the wrong in the St. Charles incident.

Back Where We Began

Just after 4pm on May 5th, in the same Kirkwood Wal-Mart parking lot where just hours earlier the young woman witnessed the peddling of water for signatures, the presence of TABOR proponents could again be felt. But this time, being hocked were promises of handsome pay for a few hours work.

Operating from the back of a rented Saturn SUV in the Wal-Mart lot, an NVO manager was running an open-air hiring hall, and was taking all comers. Her pitch was this: go door to door with NVO's voter list, gather 75 signatures on both the TABOR and eminent domain petitions --at least 50 of which come from your assigned voter list-- and earn yourself a nice $1,000 payday, cash on delivery. Get a friend to hire on and earn a $100 referral bonus.

In a matter of an hour or so, the manager had dispatched a minimum of ten freshly minted circulators --some sent into the field without her so much as even taking their name, all without even the most cursory of training-- with instructions to return to the lot at 9pm that evening and again at 7am the next day. It's anyone's guess as to whether that sort of tactic explicitly encourages and incentivizes fraud, or merely makes fraud more likely.

What we bargained for?

At least one Missouri voter --a woman who happened to be educated on the issues-- was approached by an NVO circulator, and agreed to sign one of his petitions. When she finished signing, the circulator flipped his clipboard over and told the woman that she "also had to sign the back." Suspicious of this, she read the "back" of the petition and realized that it was a different petition altogether --the TABOR petition. That, as the saying goes, is a hell of a way to run a railroad. If nothing else, incidents like these illustrate the pressing need for Missouri to take a long, hard look at what certain groups like NVO and Missourians in Charge were desperately doing to manipulate voters and qualify their initiative.

Invariably, TABOR proponents will attempt to turn any discussion of their tactics and efforts into a debate about whether we believe in and support high-minded and abstract ideals like "direct democracy" or "the right of the people to vote on these issues."

Hogwash.

The real question is whether we think our democracy ought to be the province of out-of-staters and those looking for an easy payday; whether we prefer one man's opinion that "the people" have a right to vote on his pet project or the idea that the rule of law as it exists ought to be deferred to; and finally whether we want our democracy bought, sold and traded --like so many two-dollar trinkets-- in the parking lot of a Wal-Mart on a Friday afternoon in May.