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The initiative seeking to reroute 25% of Portland Clean Energy Fund tax revenues to hiring some 400 police officers has failed the first level of signature verification necessary to place it on the November ballot.
The campaign behind the initiative, Safer Portland, submitted 63,000 signatures for verification to the city earlier this month. After its first layer of vetting—the accuracy of which has been called into question by Safer Portland in a bevy of explosive allegations—the city’s Elections Division transmitted 55,837 signatures to the Multnomah County Elections Division for sampling. The initiative needs 40,437 verified signatures to make it onto the ballot.
County elections officials sent a report to the city on Tuesday evening that determined, based on its first sample, the initiative had fallen short of that benchmark. The report says that based on sampling, the initiative had submitted only 32,880 valid signatures, far short of the 40,437 needed for the initiative to move forward.
Per state procedure, the county has now pulled a second random batch of signatures and is currently sampling those. Should the second sample also fail, the initiative is dead.
A Wednesday report provided to WW by the county’s Elections Division shows the second sample is tracking similarly to the first one. Out of 1,576 signatures counted so far, just 64% have been verified. The top reasons for nonverification, according to the report, include signatories living outside of Portland or not being registered to vote in Oregon. Should the current trend continue—4,009 signatures remain uncounted in the second sample—the initiative will fail to qualify for the ballot.
That’s unless, of course, the petitioners fight the determination in court.
And that appears to be an option the initiative’s backers have not ruled out.
Earlier this week, as preliminary results from the first sample suggested the count would fall short of the requirement, Safer Portland alleged the city and county elections divisions had erroneously discarded thousands of signatures for bogus reasons. It also alleged, with little evidence to support the claim, that city elections officials were tampering with the results due to political bias against law enforcement.
The city’s and county’s elections divisions denied the allegations; both said they were following state procedure around signature validation with integrity.
But a surprising letter from Secretary of State Tobias Read, sent to City Auditor Simone Rede on Tuesday morning, added fuel to the fire: He appeared unhappy with the elections divisions’ performance, though he stopped short of providing specific guidance.
“What I have seen in recent days regarding the 1PDX2026 initiative signature verification process reflects poorly on our state’s entire election system,” Read wrote. “I have seen complaints about a lack of transparency with stakeholders and the public, which especially concerns me. It is clear there has been a breakdown somewhere in this process.”
Deborah Scroggin, manager of the city’s Elections Division, in response told WW her office was surprised to receive Read’s letter “given our communication” with the SOS’s office in recent weeks. “We’ve informed them about our work, requested their guidance, and have not received any direction to depart from our usual process,” Scroggin said. “We look forward to informing [Secretary Read] of the facts that dispel Chief Petitioners’ false and politically motivated claims.”
As it released results of the first sample on Wednesday afternoon, the city shared that it had “rejected 498 signature pages for noncompliance with state election rules, and rejected 4,646 individual signatures on otherwise approved sheets” before sending signatures to the county for sampling. “Every time a petition page, signature line, or signature is rejected, multiple workers review the rejection before final disqualification, using an approach that enfranchises petition signers to the fullest extent possible under the law,” the division wrote.
A Safer Portland spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the failure of the first sample.
Even as it alleges the signature count is tainted, the campaign has itself been the subject of elections complaints, which mostly allege signature gatherers misled voters about what they were signing. In a signal of just how clannish the fight is, one of the people who alleged the canvassers were being dishonest was Susan Motett, who runs the Small Donor Elections program, a different city office that oversees public campaign financing.
