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A complaint filed with state elections officials July 7 alleges the campaign gathering signatures for a ballot initiative that would use 25% of the Portland Clean Energy Fund to hire police officers violated Oregon law more than a dozen times.
The complaint, which was filed by Portland lawyer Alan Kessler, a longtime police watchdog and a fierce opponent of the initiative, alleges that in over a dozen instances, canvassers were not carrying copies of the initiative’s complete text and repeatedly made false statements about who exactly would be hired by the initiative, among other violations.
“What’s pretty clear is the promoters of this initiative feel like they’re better off if the public is deceived as to what it does,” Kessler tells WW.
The ballot measure states only that it will “fund the Portland Police Bureau at a level that provides no fewer than 2.0 sworn police personnel per 1,000 City residents” and that it will establish an Enhanced Community Safety Services Fund Commission that will make a plan for maintaining that ratio by June 30, 2027, at the latest. Safer Portland, the campaign behind the initiative, hired the company FieldWorks to recruit and train canvassers.
But in videos included in the complaint, which were reviewed by WW, nine separate canvassers tell a potential signatory that the initiative will fund non-police hires. Some of them are quite explicit.
One canvasser tells the person recording the video that the initiative “would add behavioral health professional staff because the calls they get the most are mental breakdown cases…Anything to do with 911, it increases those. It increases the behavioral health, the dispatch, and police.” When the person recording presses the canvasser on the fact that the petition sheet says it will go to hiring police, the canvasser responds, “The police that they’re adding are the mental health police.”
Another canvasser tells the person recording that the initiative is “also trying to get mental health officers, not police officers, mental health officers.” The person recording asks if funding will go to Portland Street Response hires. The canvasser responds, “Yes.”
Kessler alleges that canvassers were misled by one of the talking points they were trained to use. In his complaint, he includes a copy of the talking points sheet: “This measure helps fund the next generation of Portland officers who will work alongside mental health counselors, social workers, and crisis teams — so the right responder, with better training and stronger community ties, shows up for the right situation each time.”
Elise Haas, a spokesperson for Safer Portland, says canvassers’ responses can likely be explained by them going into “fight or flight mode” when approached by someone recording them. She says no canvassers intentionally misled the public.
Under Oregon law, canvassers “may not knowingly make any false statement regarding the contents, meaning or effect of the petition” to anyone signing it or requesting information about it. And according to the state’s County, City, and District Initiative and Referendum Manual, “chief petitioners must educate circulators and monitor their activities.” The complaint argues that the chief petitioners failed in both regards.
The talking points sheet also suggests the grab line, “Hi. Sign to reduce 911 response times!” Most of the videos show canvassers using variations of that line. Multiple canvassers explicitly state funding will go to hiring more 911 dispatchers. But the initiative itself does not require a decrease in response times—only that more officers are hired.
The training is not responsible for any misunderstandings, Haas says. “It’s very clear on our messaging. That’s what we believe in, and that’s what we have trained the people to do, and if people were not following our instructions, then we would have to let them go,” Haas tells WW. At least one canvasser has been let go from the campaign for not sticking closely enough to the talking points, according to a termination notice included in the complaint.
Oregon law also requires that canvassers “carry at least one full and correct copy of the measure.” But only two of the 13 canvassers cited in the complaint had a complete copy of the ballot measure’s text. The rest had only summaries, talking point sheets, or a QR code to the campaign’s website. When pressed by the person recording, multiple canvassers said they had not been provided with the text by the people training them. (Haas says FieldWorks makes sure all canvassers have the full text on them when they go out into the field.)
The complaint also includes evidence of stacks of unattended signature sheets with signatures on them, and alleges that online and return-by-mail signature sheets distributed by the Taxpayers Association of Oregon did not include copies of the ballot text.
The complaint requests that all signatures obtain in violation of state law—from canvassers who didn’t carry the ballot text or made false statements, from stacks of unattended sheets, from mail-in sheets without copies of the text—be rejected during the verification process, which the city began on July 6 and must complete by Aug. 5.
The complaint also asks that the directors of the campaign—but not individual canvassers—be fined for every violation. Failure to carry a copy of the text could warrant up to $1,000 in fines per violation; making false statements could warrant up to $10,000.
The Portland Mercury has previously reported that at least 28 other people have filed complaints with the state regarding this ballot initiative, which submitted more than 63,000 signatures to the city on July 6. It’s unclear how many signatures could be implicated under Kessler’s complaint—more than 20,000 would need to be thrown out for the initiative to fall below the minimum number of 40,437 to get on the November ballot.
