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March 30, 2011 02:30 AM UTC

DPS Recall Signatures Submitted

  • 61 Comments
  • by: c rork

Update: 6,300 signatures have been submitted to city election officials. This amount only factors in that 17% of the signatures might be invalid. Without the use of a voter database system (which costs money) it would be hard to guarantee that this recall will make it to the ballot.

———–

As of the end of business today, 5,363 valid signatures were due in support of the recall of DPS board President Nate Easley. EdNews Colorado had a very informative podcast and article that provide an update on the current situation.

Since I wrote my first post about the recall effort about a month ago, “Take Back Our Schools” and its leader, John McBride, have failed to obtain a bank account (even one that comes with a free iPod) or comply with a single campaign finance deadline. These tactics, particularly running a petition effort without ever listing expenses, drew rebuke when Doug Bruce used them to run a fly-by-night operation and they deserve the same attention in this recall effort. Denver voters deserve transparency as to who is paying for this effort.

Speaking of shady tactics, the podcast interview with reporter Charlie Brennan added to the effort’s disrepute:

Brennan: “On one of (Take Back Our School’s) fliers it is alleged Nate Easley “allowed” 140 African-American teachers to be either suspended or fired in the past year.”

Gottlieb: “And that turns out to be, as far as I can tell, flat-out false.”

Brennan: “No, that does appear to be a flat-out inaccuracy based on the most recent diversity statistics DPS provided to the board June of last year.”

The primary accusation of “Take Back Our Schools” was, again, thoroughly debunked. Proponents claim that Nate Easley’s position as the DPS board president conflicts with his role as Deputy Director of the Denver Schools Foundation since Superintendent Tom Boasberg is an ex-officio member of the board.

Brennan: “(Boasberg) has no vote, no say over the employment status of Nate Easley with DSF. Nate, in turn, tells us, and we’ve seen documented evidence to support this, that… in March of 2009, before he even officially became a candidate for the school board, went to DPS General Council John Kechriotis seeking a legal opinion as to whether Mr. Kechriotis believed there would be a conflict of interest should Nate… seek the seat. The DPS council told Nate that in his opinion there was no conflict of interest. He subsequently privided Nate with a signed affadavit to that effect.”

It will be a bit before the signatures have been validated. If they are, a recall vote will not coincide with the mayoral race and will cost the district over $100,000. The expected date of a potential recall election is likely to be in late June.

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61 thoughts on “DPS Recall Signatures Submitted”

  1. That’s a pretty enthusiastic number to turn in. 😛 You’d think they’d wait to gloat. I know I am.

    I’d recommend the diary, but figure most people are either sick or heart sick of the whole thing at this point. Thanks for the update all the same.

    1. That’s an awfully optimistic number to turn in. That’s assuming only about a 10 percent rate of invalid signatures, which is very low. (Especially for a rag-tag group of citizen activists just passing the hat for pizza — the professionals usually don’t get near 90 percent valid signatures on the expensive drives they run.)

      1. If your standing in front of the grocery store, your validity rate will be somewhere around 75% (except the Queen Soopers in cap hill where it drops to 55% – not a good collection point!).

        Outside of a denver public Library: nearly 85%

        If you go door to door with a voter registration walking list, you can achieve well over 90%, usually better than 95%.

        I got these percentages from my pervious work running petitions drives.

        1. what is the bar they have to pass with valid signatures ?  Or is it some number they have to pass with just any set of signatures ? Is it 5000 even ?

          You would know.  Just curious.

          1. That’s 40% of the total votes cast for all of the candidates in Nate’s district in 2009. They turned in approximately 6,300.  

            2. They may have plenty of valid signatures for the recall, but it’s a pretty standard rule of thumb that in any petition drive you try to at least double the required number. Signatures get thrown out for all kinds of reasons.  

              1. One of the most frequent reasons for signature invalidation, that a voter signed more than one petition, won’t apply in this case. But who wants to bet there will be some problems with signature gatherers and plenty of voters will have signed more than once. The thing is, even if dEFeNSe knows signatures are invalid, they have to turn them in or trash the entire sheet, so I’m taking their prediction of a shortfall as well informed.

                  1. Officials will say how many were ruled valid, how many invalid. They’ll probably also go into more detail to the petitioners, though maybe not in a public announcement.

                2. In this sort of petition it really doesn’t matter, except to save the DED’s time from having to look at those ones.

                  In a statewide issue petition, the signatures are checked by ramdom sample, so crossing out the bad one ups the odds that the ramdom sampling will select ones that are good.

                    3. if you ever run for SoS, I will happily work for free full time for your campaign.  

                    4. I have a button sitting on the table where I put my mail. Anytime I start thinking seriously about running for a big office I only have to look at it.

                      It says: “Vote for me. My scandals will be far more interesting!”

                    5. Scandalous people are far more interesting and usually far more compassionate.  

              3. It is very very interesting that they had walk lists. That would imply access to a voter database. As I understand it, access is fairly expensive? How did they get walk lists???

                1. But that was for a Democratic campaign where the party (who owns the access to the database) offered a substantial discount to its own caniddates.

                  I don’t know what they would charge for a campaign of this nature.

                  Of course there are those who are so scrupulous as to seek proper access and may use they access they already have as a party activist. Just saying, it happens.

                2. Many of the people involved in DeFENSE already have access to VAN through being party officials (i.e. PCPs/HD Captains/etc) but the kind of access you need to build lists is very specific. IIRC, if you’re a PCP for a HD in, say, Denver, then you don’t have access to build lists for, say, an entire DPS school board district or the even the entire city of Denver.

                  Everyone can use the “quick look-up”, but unless you have access to the entire city of Denver, it’s going to be tough to get the voters you want to be talking to.

                  Of course, if you’re, say, a school board member from DPS (not naming names here…) you would probably have the city-wide access you’d need to build lists to canvass for petitions in Nate Easley’s district.

                  Then again, it looks like they did a shitty job of getting signatures, so it’s probably much ado about nothing.

          2. I think it’s worth pointing out that they were paying people by the signature. Had they kept it around the hat, eh. But random FB friends and teh Craig’s List?

            Still not gloating until the counting is done. But they definitely shouldn’t be either.

              1. ONE: they apparently have not filed any expense reporting (from what I read above) that they paid circulators, a major campaign violation which could potentially threaten the effort going forward even if they have enough signatures.

                TWO: paid circulators have really sucky validity rates. They are only interested in getting paid so go for quantity and not quality. Volunteer circulators do much much better.

                1. DeFENSE probably did. McBride said that “they” (the campaign) fixed DeFENSE because “they” were not going to pay people. A problem in itself.*

                  Either way, it wouldn’t have been in McBride’s report. Just like none of the other in-kind or otherwise contributions weren’t.

                  *MotR’s sarcasm aside, the ad for paid circulators was on FB several times, as was the Craig’s List ad. The problem is that no one is forcing them (DeFENSE) to file any expenses, so their claim that those were for something else (in spite of McBride’s correction) cannot be verified.

                2. It depends on who you go through, and how they pay their circulators. If you go with people who get paid per signature, then you’re probably going to have a pretty crappy validity rate. This is what the Republicans normally do for ballot initiative petition gathering, like the Amendment 47 campaign.

                  But if you go through one of the two fairly legitimate organizations that most Democratic campaigns use for their paid petition gatherers, they’re actually pretty reliable. They pay their gatherers by the hour, not by the signature, and they usually have their contracts set up to be a certain number of valid signatures.

                  Anyway, it’s a little more complicated than Dan is making it. Although I will say that if DeFENSE did it the way that Droll is describing–getting people off of Facebook and Craigslist and paying them per sig–then it’s likely that their signature validity rate will be, as Dan said, really sucky.

                3. You’re a smart guy.

                  So you KNOW that whatever violations occur don’t ever threaten anything.

                  Colorado’s campaign finance laws have no teeth.  You can’t lose an election by breaking the rules.  Until you can, there might as well be no rules.

                  1. If they push hard enough they can tie up the funds and attention (what little there is) of a campaign plus paint the campaigners as dirty and cause a loss that way.

                    Not that I would advocate winning an election that way. I am just saying.

            2. The DeFENsE folks said yesterday they doubt they collected enough valid signatures but want it on record more than 6,000 people object to Easley’s conduct.

                  1. To hope everyone forgot what they said ten minutes before. I wonder how many of those signatures come from parents with children in DPS? God knows everyone else is just a political hack with no actual say.

                    On their Facebook page they are gloating on the spin then. A “liked” statement there, “We actually got more signatures than you received in votes. I guess that we have spoken.” Who the hell knows how many people supported him but either didn’t bother, or were not eligible to vote? Dumb.

                    Well, whatever. Hopefully the district can save its cash and they go away now. OR stop being shady jackasses and work with the community (city wide and even with people who disagree) for actual change.

                    3. REmember droll, parents with children in DPS were not allowed to automatically sit on the committees that A plus created and controlled.  Remember droll, that the A plus committee controlled who sat on their committees….do you have the list of who is the A plus group? Do you have the criteria that A plus used to decide who got to sit on their committee which created the so-called NE Reform?   I didn’t think so.

                    4. has nothing to do with this recall, dwyer. Remember, dwyer, that there is a very specific complaint in the petition that happens to be a lie. Dwyer, our ballots are arguably the most important part of our democracy. If you want to start an honest buyer’s remorse recall, dwyer, feel free to do so.

                      At any rate, your question is irrelevant to my comment. Suggesting that only parents have any interest in our schools is not only prejudicial, but also short sighted. Oh, and stupid. I work here, I live here, I hope to die here, I’ll pay taxes all along here. The quality of the three, and the willingness of the fourth, is completely dependent on our school system. So as my friend already told DeFENSE, on behalf of every single, homosexual, and barren person in the city, fuck you.

                    5. a) you don’t have kids in the district, so not only do you not understand, you have no say

                      b) investment in public schools needs funding and we all need to pay

                      So Douglas County gets vouchers paid for by the state contribution to their district but because I don’t live in Douglas CSD I don’t have a say.

                      Because you don’t have kids in DPS, funded in part by DPS tax and part from state tax, your opinion doesn’t matter.

                      I don’t get it. Either education is a public investment or it’s not.  I prefer that it is.

                    6. I explained long ago why I support the recall.  I don’t think the reason given on the petition is legit; I have already said that. However, I would like to see Easley off the board, the recall is one way to do that.

                      But you made a big deal that the petition signers didn’t necessarily have children in the school, but were probably political hacks….hence my comment above.

                      on behalf of every single, homosexual, and barren person in the city, fuck you.

                      I happen to know that you don’t personally speak for everyone you listed above…..

                      You are swinging in wider and wider circles and I don’t know why.  I hope it is nothing serious.

        3. take every opportunity to sign every petition for every casue one disagrees with, as many times as is possible — using obviously disqualifying information.

          And, spare me your disapproval.  Just sayin’ — sometimes mathematics can be a hoot.

    1. 6300 is a googly number so it will likely take the whole 10 days. That puts it at 8 Apr when we will likely know if they are good or not.

      BTW, that timing puts the city’s run-off election in the 60-90 day window after verification of the petitions to allow the recall to be on the same ballot and avoid a separate election (which would be very expensive).

      That is, of course, if there is a recall electiona t all, which i am not holding my breath for given the number of signatures turned in.

      1. If, somehow, the petitions actually get approved there will also be a 15 day challenge window, which will almost certainly be utilized. The conclusion of that will push it outside the runoff. As I read the stories on this, the city elections office has already indicated that the 60 days will start from the conclusion of any challenges, not from April 8th.

        So, still wasting $100k.  

  3. is that it contradicts Thurgood Marshal’s victory. While more neighborhoods have ethnic diversity than when I was a child(almost none-redling was a common practice)

    Denver still displays heavy segregation.

    The whole case of Brown v. Board of Education was that separate is not equal.

    The concept of permitting children to go to school in other neighborhoods seems in line with the belief in integration.

    Lotteries are a different matter. I don’t like them.

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