Complaint filed in recall campaign

Gary Dielman included with his letter copies of petition signature sheets from the campaign to recall Mayor Dennis Dorrah and Councilor Beverly Calder.

Dorrah and Calder are two of the four city councilors who voted to fire Brocato on June 9, a decision that prompted the recall campaign.

The County Clerk’s office mailed recall ballots to city voters earlier this month.

Ballots must be returned by 8 p.m. on Oct. 27.

Don Hamilton, a spokesman from Oregon Secretary of State’s office, which oversees the Elections Division, said Tuesday that the division received Dielman’s letter on Monday and that officials have started an investigation.

That’s standard procedure when the Elections Division receives written complaints, Hamilton said.

The state will send a letter to both Brocato and Regan asking them to respond to Dielman’s allegation, Hamilton said.

Dielman contends that Brocato and Regan violated ORS 260.555(4).

That statute reads: “No person shall knowingly sign an initiative, referendum or recall petition more than once, knowingly sign such petition when not qualified to sign it, or sign such petition in any name other than the person’s own.”

Violating the statute is a Class C felony,  which has a maximum penalty of a $125,000 fine and five years in prison.

Separate from the criminal penalties, the Secretary of State or Attorney General can impose a civil fine of as much as $250.

The petition signature sheet form includes the line, near the top: “Do not sign this petition more than once.”

“I think it’s a very clear violation,” said Dielman, who served on the City Council from January 1999 until December 2001, when voters recalled him from office.

Dielman said the petition sheets that include Brocato’s and Regan’s signatures “were brought to my attention,” but he declined to say who did so.

Petition signature sheets are public records.

Regan, who works as the Baker City Police’s Community Service Officer, said Monday that she didn’t purposely sign twice on the petition to recall Dorrah.

“That was an error,” she said. “I signed one in error thinking I was signing for the other (subject of the recall, Calder).”

Brocato said Tuesday that he “may have signed one (petition) twice.”

Referring to Dielman, Brocato said: “It’s very comforting to know that someone with conscientious motives in protecting the democratic process is out there.”

Brocato contends, though, that his signatures are irrelevant because the recall promoters gathered 35 more valid signatures than they needed to force a recall vote for Calder, and 61 more than they needed for the Dorrah petition.

“We have tempests in a teapot — this is a tempest in a thimble,” Brocato said.

Hamilton said that although duplicate signatures on petitions “are not uncommon, actual criminal prosecutions are rare.”

He did not have statistics about how often the state files criminal charges against people accused of signing petitions more than once.

The key word in the state law, Hamilton said, is “knowingly.”

Proving that a person who signed a petition more than once did so knowingly “is a tricky thing to do,” he said. “It’s a high standard.”

“Generally our approach has been corrective, educational,” Hamilton said.

As an example, the state might send a letter to a person who apparently signed a petition more than once, reminding the person that state law prohibits multiple signatures.

The state also could levy the civil fine of up to $250 even if no criminal charges are filed.

County Clerk Tami Green said the signature violations, if proved, would not invalidate the Dorrah/Calder recall election because duplicate signatures are not counted toward the 603 signatures recall proponents needed to gather, on both the Dorrah and Calder petitions, to force the election.

Green verified 664 signatures on the Dorrah petition, and 638 on the Calder petition.

Although Dielman lists just Regan and Brocato in the complaint letter to the Elections Division, clerk’s office records show that 20 other voters signed at least one of the recall petitions twice.

Of those 20, eight signed twice on both the Calder and Dorrah petitions, and 12 duplicated their signatures on one of the petitions.

Dielman said he does not intend to file complaints against any of those 20 voters.

He said he made the allegation against Brocato and Regan because, in his opinion, both should have known that it was illegal to sign petitions twice.

Brocato, Dielman said, “is the person who’s the crux of the whole thing, and he’s cheating, and that’s why I’m picking on him.”

As for Regan, Dielman noted that besides working for the city, she circulated petitions for the recall.

“These two people are intimately associated with this recall election,” he said.

Brocato’s name is printed on two separate sheets for both the Dorrah and Calder recall petitions.

On two sheets, one for Dorrah and one for Calder, the date beside Brocato’s name is June 19.

Brocato’s wife, Vicki, is listed as the circulator for both of those sheets (each petition sheet must be signed by the person who circulated it; that person is responsible for witnessing each person’s signature).

However, although Brocato’s name is signed on both sheets, neither signature matches Brocato’s signature on his voter registration card, Green said.

As a result, both of the June 19 signatures — the ones on the sheets that Vicki Brocato circulated — were rejected and not counted toward the required 603 signatures, Green said.

Brocato’s name also is printed on two petition sheets circulated by City Councilor Milo Pope — one sheet for Calder and one for Dorrah. The date beside Brocato’s name on both sheets is Aug. 21.

(Pope is one of the three councilors who voted against the motion to fire Brocato.)

Both of the Aug. 21 signatures, one on the Dorrah recall, one on the Calder recall, match the signature on Brocato’s voter registration card, and each was counted, Green said.

Dielman disagrees with Green about the validity of Brocato’s June 19 signatures.

Dielman wrote in an e-mail to the Herald: “I was convinced that the double signatures matched the signers, because the collectors knew for sure who they were, because the collectors of Brocato’s two (June 19) signatures were his wife and Milo Pope.”

Dielman said he can’t believe that either Vicki Brocato or Pope, both of whom obviously know Steve Brocato, would have allowed someone else to sign his name on the petitions.

Steve Brocato actually agrees with Dielman in disputing the clerk’s office’s conclusion that the June 19 signatures do not match Brocato’s voter registration card.

Brocato said his signature “changes as I go through the day,” which he believes would account for the difference between the two June 19 signatures on the petition sheets his wife circulated, and the Aug. 21 signatures on the sheets Pope circulated.

Regan signed a petition sheet for the Dorrah recall on June 17; she circulated that petition herself.

Regan’s name also is listed, with a June 29 date, on a Dorrah petition signature sheet circulated by Kirk McCormick, a detective with the police department.

Both signatures matched Regan’s voter registration card, so the second signature, from June 29, was rejected as a duplicate and not counted toward the 603 required signatures, Green said.

Regan’s June 17 signature did count.

Chris Collins of the Baker City Herald contributed to this story.