It used to be that the U.S. Supreme Court Pruneyard decision allowed petition circulators to gather signatures from people at privately owned shopping malls, that is until superstores such as Target, Home Depot and Walmart decided they weren’t shopping malls and the ruling didn’t apply.
“The biggest issues we have for circulators now basically is access,” said Fred Kimball, owner of Kimball Petition Management in Thousand Oaks. “Particularly stores and chains are cutting down on access rights in front of their markets.”
The Pruneyard decision held that malls had essentially replaced town squares as political speaking arenas and, as a result, free political speech could not be blocked.
According to BallotPedia, SCOTUS upheld the California Supreme Court in finding that the state constitution allows for petition rights on private shopping center property as a reasonable exercise of free speech.
“You could circulate petitions anywhere until some particular attorneys said the Pruneyard decision doesn’t apply to independent stores that are on their own grounds and are not part of a shopping center,” Kimball told the Southern California Record. “Other stores got injunctions against circulators and suddenly you’ve got a bunch of chains that don’t allow circulators.”
For example, in 2017, Ralph’s grocery chain sued petition circulator Victory Consultants for trespassing.
“The circulators are trying to be more friendly now instead of contentious when it comes to getting signatures so we now have people that talk to store managers in advance to explain we are gathering signatures not creating trouble,” Kimball said.
Legal proceedings, such as lawsuits and injunctions blocking access, are just one of several obstacles that have emerged that are designed to deter petition circulators, according to experts.
“There's always a rule changing something about the process that the legislature thinks will make it more difficult but it doesn't for us paid circulators,” Kimball said. “We just adapt to the new rules. What they are doing is making it harder for volunteers, which drives the business of using only paid petition circulators.”
According to Michael Arno, founder of Arno Political Consultants, there are three components to pricing for petition circulators, also known as signature gatherers, which include number of signatures, obtained how much time it takes to gather signatures and the issue at stake.
“If you're monkeying with any of those three factors, the job will probably be more costly and paying by the hour rather than pay-per-signature always raises the price,” Arno told the Southern California Record.
On average, signature gatherers are paid $60 an hour for multiple petitions at $15 a petition or $5 to $6 per signature, according to experts.
“You pay someone by the signature and if they get a signature in the wrong county or if they didn't get a signature, you can deduct that from their pay,” Arno said in an interview. “You can't do that for an hourly pay person. So, they aren't as careful about that. I ran a drive in San Diego where I had hired people by the hour and they were the worst of the bunch by far."
Gov. Newsom’s new executive order, which allows voting by mail in November due to the alleged threat of COVID-19, will cause a hike in the price of petition circulator services because it increases the number of signatures needed for an initiative to qualify for placement on the ballot, according to Kimball.
“Where the vote-by-mail affects us is the amount of signatures that we're required to get is based on the last gubernatorial election,” Kimball said. “We went from needing 360,000 signatures to qualify a statue to where we are now up to 628,000 signatures. That's because there's a large permanent absentee now where people are voting by mail. So, more people are voting in California than we basically had before and the second reason is we had a contested gubernatorial election.”
Finally, SB-47, the Petition Disclosure Act, requires the top three funders of an initiative to be listed on the petition that voters are asked to sign.
“This is a significant change because it shows people who actually is supporting the measure and provides additional information for the voter to be informed when they are in fact signing the petition,” said Stephen Kaufman, an attorney and former president of the California Political Attorneys Association. “But because of the timing of the new law, many of the initiatives that have qualified for the ballot in November were not required to do that as part of their circulation process but going forward for any measure that essentially went into circulation after January 1, 2020 all those petitions are required to provide information about the donors supporting the initiative.”