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A federal judge on Thursday effectively eliminated any remaining chance that an initiative seeking to hire more police officers with Portland climate tax dollars could appear on the November ballot. U.S. District Judge Michael Simon rejected a lawsuit from the initiative’s backers seeking a recount of signatures that city and Multnomah County elections officials deemed invalid in August.
In his denial of a motion for a preliminary injunction, Simon said elections officials followed the law in throwing out signatures (and in some cases, whole signature sheets) because of errors made by signature gatherers. A recount, he said, would produce the same result. “There is no likelihood of success on the merits,” Simon wrote, “or even serious questions going to the merits.”
Simon’s ruling appears to end a messy episode that saw the ballot initiative’s backers—including the Portland police union—accuse both city and county elections officials of running a rigged process. In a signal of the stakes, the backers, a group called Safer Portland, hired a former U.S. Department of Justice attorney who has argued for the Trump administration in the president’s efforts to seize state voting rolls.
The underlying cause was itself politically explosive: The petitioners sought to redirect millions of dollars from the Portland Clean Energy Fund to hiring enough cops to bring Portland’s police force in line with those of other American cities. What’s more, Portlanders noticed over the summer that signature gatherers appeared to be misrepresenting what the proposal would do, claiming that it would mandate faster 911 response times. Dozens of people complained to the state.
What the Thursday ruling also makes clear is that the signatures those circulators collected were submitted in sloppy condition. Simon noted that some were thrown out because they didn’t list the dates they were gathered, or listed two dates without clarifying which was correct. Others were signed by circulators with signatures that didn’t match the signature on file. Those were the sheets city officials threw out in their entirety—and Simon wrote that they were legally correct to do so.
Simon also notes that the county rejected individual signatures for good reason. “The largest group of rejected signatures was because the signer did not reside within the City of Portland, which is a legal requirement for eligibility to vote on a City of Portland initiative,” the judge writes. “The next largest group of rejected signatures was because the signer was not registered to vote in Oregon. The third-largest group of rejected signatures was because the signature on the petition did not match the signature in the Oregon voter database.”
Simon adds: “The county then performed a second sample, as required under Oregon law, and the results were remarkably similar.”
After two samplings, the Safer Portland campaign was short by 6,307 valid signatures of the 40,437 required to make the November ballot. The deadline for appearing on the ballot passed several weeks ago—but had Simon ordered a recount, that could have thrown chaos into the last weeks before ballots are mailed to voters Oct. 14.
His ruling arrives after a Sept. 1 evidentiary hearing in which Simon heard testimony from the initiative’s backers as well as city and county elections officials, and considered evidence from the petitioners—including evidence that the circulators vouched for their rejected signature sheets. Simon wrote that this corroboration was largely irrelevant: It’s not how officials were supposed to determine a sheet’s validity.
Simon’s ruling concluded with a full-throated vindication of the system. “The city and county defendants applied state and local election laws, rules, and standards in good faith, even-handedly, and in a politically neutral manner, all to protect the reliability and integrity of the election process,” he wrote. “Moreover, these laws, rules, and standards are reasonable and do not impose severe restrictions on the right to vote or gather signatures.”
Deborah Scroggin, Elections Division manager for the city, said in a statement that she welcomed Simon’s ruling.
“The plaintiffs had the opportunity to test their allegations in federal court, where claims must be supported by evidence. The court denied their request to reinvent Oregon law,” Scroggin said. “Portland City Elections followed the law, applied the same standards used for every petition, and accurately reported the result. We are gratified that the court recognized the integrity of that work.”
A spokesperson for the Safer Portland campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
