Voter-owned election: Update

Looks more and more like the effort by the First Things First Committee to put a challenge to Portland's clean money law on the May ballot is dead. The question both sides seem to be asking is: How did such a strikingly high number of bad signatures get on the signature sheets?

In a 2002 ballot measure to change Portland's form of government, the county found just eight duplicates in 4,000 signatures. That's 0.2 percent. In the random sample conducted of First Things First's petitions, the county found that more than 4 percent of the signatures were duplicates. Ted Blaszak's Democracy Resources gathered signatures for both campaigns.

"In talking with the secretary of state's office and looking at (Blaszak's) past track record, this is an incredibly huge number of duplicates. So there are some abnormalities, and we are looking into why," said Ellie Booth, a spokeswoman for the repeal effort. "There are some tidbits of hearsay from here and there that Ted has heard from his signature gatherers that we're looking into."