The Worst-Kept Secret in Olympia – A Witness Tells All

Elections workers process initiative petitions at the state elections office.

By Erik Smith

Staff Writer/ Washington State Wire

OLYMPIA, Aug. 6.—Last month’s signature-fraud scandal in the campaign for Initiative 1098 – this year’s income-tax initiative – might be a dead issue by now if it wasn’t for one thing.

            Until this point, no one has named the name. At least, not officially.

            The name of the Service Employees International Union official who is thought to have forged 349 names on election petitions has been whispered all over this capital city, but it hasn’t been released in a formal way. Officials of the secretary of state’s office, which oversees elections, provided the name to the I-1098 campaign shortly after the questionable signatures were discovered, when election officials were still reeling in shock. The campaign and its leading supporter, SEIU, chose to disclose that the woman was a union official. But who was it? There’s been a cone of silence at the Capitol ever since. Attorneys decided the release of the name might get the state in hot water.

The state is under a court order not to release initiative petitions to the public, because of an unrelated lawsuit filed by backers of last year’s anti-gay-rights measure, Referendum 71. And attorneys for the elections office decided that applied to any information on those petitions – including the name of the woman who is now under investigation by the Washington State Patrol.

Yet there were plenty of witnesses to the discovery – at least 30 signature checkers were going over the petition sheets when the name was discovered. They all knew the name. There were others in the room at the time as well. They heard it, too.

And a public records act request has led Washington State Wire to an email that identifies the name – and a witness unconnected with the secretary of state’s office who saw the whole thing.

And the name is – ?

Well, let’s let the man tell his story.

            Meet Eddie Spaghetti

Edward Agazarm, best known as ‘Eddie Spaghetti,’ is one of those players in Washington state politics who seldom shows up in a headline, but who has a great influence on the process. Spaghetti – everybody calls him that, he says – is one of the founders of Citizen Solutions, a firm that runs paid signature drives for ballot-measure campaigns. Since 2001 his company has collected millions of signatures.

This year his crews hit the streets for three initiatives – I-1053, the measure that requires a two-thirds vote of the Legislature for taxes; I-1082, the measure that would allow private insurance companies to compete with the state worker-compensation system; and I-1100, which would junk the state liquor stores and allow retailers to buy alcoholic beverages directly from manufacturers.

Spaghetti was at the elections office July 13, as election officials were finishing their random check of signatures for I-1082 and getting started on the next one – I-1098. Initiative Supervisor Teresa Glidden passed out big stacks of petitions and told the signature checkers to get to work.

And it didn’t take them long to find the problem.

Said Spaghetti, “Teresa just plopped this stack of petitions on my desk and said, ‘Look at this!’ I looked at ‘em, and I could not believe it.”

The signatures were all in the same hand, with the same pen. And there was something else he noticed. The sheets were neat – not rumpled, not folded, not torn. No petition looks like that when it comes back from the field.

He looked on the back, where the petitions are signed by the signature gatherers. Looked like the same handwriting.

Said Spaghetti, “All of them were signed by Claudia McKinney.”

           Goes Straight to Google

Spaghetti said he watched in amazement as the signature checkers were told to look for any other sheets signed by McKinney. They also started looking at every petition sheet to see if there were any other tell-tale signs of fraud. Spaghetti said he had never seen such a thing – at least nothing as obvious as that. If anyone at the I-1098 campaign had looked at the petition sheets before they turned them in, he said they would have spotted them in an instant.

Emails that circulated within the secretary of state’s office back up the story. Election officials eventually found 20 of the woman’s petition sheets. Some of the signatures were legit, others not. Ultimately they say they found 349 signatures they believe to be fraudulent. Signature fraud is a Class C felony under Washington state law, punishable by up to five years in prison, a $10,000 fine, or both.

In a July 13 email, assistant state elections director Shane Hamlin said, “Teresa called me immediately after discovering these suspicious petitions.  She said the handwriting looks like the same handwriting of the person who signed the petition gatherer declarations. She also reports that the names appear to have come ‘right out of the phone book.’”

The gang down at the elections office got an even bigger surprise when they went to the Internet and looked up her name. Elections director Nick Handy wrote to Secretary of State Sam Reed: “Googling [name withheld] shows a fairly prominent union official with SEIU, the Service Employees International Union.”

            Who is Claudia McKinney?

Here’s what they found:

n      A June 7 blog posting on the SEIU Local 775 website that identified McKinney as a member of the state home-care worker bargaining team.

n      An April 14 blog posting on the same site that identified McKinney as a member of a Local 775 team that went to Missouri to organize home care workers in that state.

The June 7 blog posting has been altered since the fraud investigation was launched. McKinney’s name is nowhere to be found. Meanwhile, the April 14 posting no longer can be accessed from the union’s main page, but it can be reached from the direct link above.

Spaghetti saved a copy of the original blog posts and appended them to an email he sent to Reed. So the original version is part of the official record.

            A Voter-Registration Violation?

McKinney is hard to reach. There are two listings for that name in Internet phone-directory records, both of them for apartments in the Sea-Tac area. But the phone is disconnected for one and there is no telephone listing for the other.

Ever since the story started getting around, there have been plenty of people interested in reaching McKinney. Among them is the King County elections department. That’s because there may be another crime involved.

One of the surest ways to locate a person is with voter-registration records. The law requires that a voter provide a birthday -- McKinney is 52 -- and a physical address. The address ensures the registrant votes in the correct district. Voters can provide a separate mailing address, but they have to swear they’re telling the truth about their residence, under penalty of law.

Voter registration records show that McKinney gave the address of an EZ Check Cash outlet just south of Sea-Tac International Airport at 19019 International Boulevard, also known as Highway 99. She listed her address as No. 267 – but it’s a post office box, not an apartment.

Kim van Ekstrom, spokeswoman for the King County elections department, said her office received a number of inquiries about McKinney’s voter registration after the signature fraud investigation was launched in Olympia. Strangely, she said, none of the calls have come from the news media.

Now her office wants to talk to McKinney, too. “We’ve tried to contact her to request a change of address but we have not been able to reach her,” she said.

Failure to provide a correct physical address for voter registration purposes is a Class C felony with penalties just as stiff as for initiative signature fraud. But in practice the crime is rarely punished. All King County wants is an updated card.

Voter registration records indicate there are 33 other voters living at the same address.

            An Enormous Embarrassment

The affair has been an enormous embarrassment for SEIU, which has vowed sanctions against anyone involved in signature fraud – perhaps even revoking union membership. The union paid $345,000 to help get the income-tax measure on the ballot, and provided a legion of signature gatherers who circulated petitions for free. The volunteer effort augmented the paid drive the campaign ran at the same time. One persistent element of the rumor sweeping Olympia has been that SEIU was running a signature-gathering contest, and the signature-fraud suspect may have been working to win an all-expense-paid lobbying trip to Washington, D.C.

That part of the story appears not to be true. Although blog postings demonstrate that there was a signature gathering contest, and there was a winner – SEIU member Noel Bain – it appears that the contest was run by Local 925, not McKinney’s Local 775. The blog said he won with only 300 signatures, and clearly that wouldn’t have given him the top score if all union members were involved. Local 925 officials have since said that there was no winner, and blog postings referring to the contest have been deleted.

In an email message, Local 775 vice president Adam Glickman betrayed what may have been a bit of weariness with the story. Glickman said, “WE DID NOT HAVE A CONTEST FOR SIGNATURE GATHERING. PERIOD. ANOTHER LOCAL UNION DID. NOBODY WON. STORY OVER. We will look at pursuing sanctions if the person is found guilty of fraud.”

It’s a matter the campaign has to take seriously, of course, said I-1098 spokesman Sandeep Kaushik. But it appears the problem was a lone volunteer out of hundreds who worked on the campaign, involving just 350 signatures out of 385,000. “We don’t want this in any way to detract from the good and tireless work people did to get this on the ballot this fall.”

Spaghetti Blames SEIU

Spaghetti says the campaign isn’t an innocent victim. Somebody should have looked at those petition sheets. That’s what the pros do.

Spaghetti sent an email to Reed right after the signatures were discovered – and on this one, McKinney’s name wasn’t blacked out. Paid signature gatherers get a bad rap, he said, and he wanted to make sure everyone understood McKinney was a volunteer.

           “As you know, I have been before our legislative committees nearly every year and testified that the greatest risk of such crimes comes from the overzealous volunteer, not the paid professional,” he wrote. “The instant case certainly bears this out. Claudia McKinney is NOT A PAID PROFESSIONAL.”

After Spaghetti got home the day the signatures were discovered, he said he went straight to his computer. He wanted to make sure McKinney hadn’t gathered any signatures for him. He was relieved to find out she wasn’t in the database.

            “I think SEIU didn’t do right by her,” he said. “Her life is going to be ruined now. Chances are she’s going to get convicted, she’s going to have a criminal record. She’s not a young woman. She was let down. They should have caught it.”



EZ Check Cash -- the store on the right -- is the home of Claudia McKinney, according to voter registration records. From Google Street View.