Irregular voter signatures halt Sonoma County tax measure campaign, prompt investigation

Thousands of potentially fraudulent voter signatures have derailed an effort to add a quarter-cent sales tax to the November ballot to support children’s health and care in Sonoma County.

Our Kids Our Future, a Santa Rosa-based campaign looking to fund child care and child health care, turned in 29,686 signatures June 21 to the county’s voter registrar for verification. Of those, over 2,500 signatures were irregular, said Deva Proto, the county’s registrar of voters.

“The initiative has failed in terms of the signature gathering,” Proto said.

She said her office discovered entire packets with problems. The majority had signatures that did not match the signatures in the voter registration rolls, but other errors included voters who misspelled their own names and misspelled Rohnert Park.

“It appears likely they’re fraudulent,” Proto said.

The group needed at least 21,038 valid signatures — 10% of the total votes cast by local voters in the last election for governor — to qualify.

It is not unusual for campaigns to have 1% to 2% of voter signatures that don’t match, but the number of problematic signatures turned in by Our Kids Our Future was 9.6%, Proto said.

Given the high number of problematic signatures, Proto said her office will be compiling information and sending it to the Sonoma County District Attorney’s Office and the California Secretary of State’s Office for an investigation.

The campaign used local volunteers and a professional contractor, Total Signers, to collect signatures, said Dennis Rosatti, a political consultant for the campaign.

Ananda Sweet, Our Kids Our Future’s board president, said the organization audited the packets after learning of the concerns, and found that the problem signatures came from Total Signers.

“After the extensive review we determined that thousands of the signatures delivered by Total Signers were the ones that were unmatched signatures,” Sweet said.

Representatives from Total Signers could not be reached for comment Tuesday.

Proto could not confirm whether the failed signatures came from the campaign’s local volunteers or the contractor, but she said collectors must identify themselves on the back of each packet they used to collect voter signatures.

“We are seeing that the petition packets that have a high number of invalid signatures are people from out of the area, based on their residence address,” Proto said.

Total Signers LLC was registered to a Fresno address in 2020, a search of the California Secretary of State’s business database found. The company did not respond to requests for comment.

Our Kids Our Future has projected the tax measure, if passed, would bring in $22 million annually.

According to the campaign, 60% of the revenue would support pay for child care employees, workforce growth and expansion of the child care network as a whole. The remaining 40% would fund perinatal and early childhood mental health, pediatric screening and treatment, and assisting children facing issues like homelessness.

The registrar’s findings have left Our Kids Our Future scrambling to find a way forward.

One option involves asking the Sonoma County Board of Supervisors to add the measure to the ballot, Sweet said.

If the board did so, the measure would need a two-thirds approval to pass, under state law.

A tax measure that qualifies by signature collection, which Our Kids Our Future had intended to do, requires only a simple majority to pass.

Sweet said Our Kids Our Future is determined not to allow “a small group of bad actors” to stop the measure.

The Board of Supervisors has not formally supported the measure, but all five supervisors have individually endorsed it, according to Our Kids Our Future’s website.

Santa Rosa Mayor Chris Rogers, Vice-mayor Eddie Alvarez, Healdsburg Vice-mayor Ariel Kelley have endorsed the measure, along with U.S. Rep. Mike Thompson; D-Napa and state Sen. Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg, are among several other Sonoma County elected leaders who have endorsed Our Kids Our Future’s tax initiative, according to the campaign website.

“We have really broad, cross-sector support,” Sweet said. “We’re absolutely in a good position to move forward in some way.”

You can reach Staff Writer Emma Murphy at 707-521-5228 or emma.murphy@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @MurphReports.