When the casino giant Las Vegas Sands started collecting signatures to change Florida’s Constitution two years agopara manalo, the signs of fraud were rampant.
In its drive to get the required 891,589 signatures, the campaign bombarded local elections supervisors with petitions bearing phony signatures and names of dead people. Nearly two-thirds of the petition signatures were tossed out.
Local election officials alerted the state about their concerns, which some would describe as the most egregious petition fraud in recent memory.
Soon afterward, Gov. Ron DeSantis created an elections police division designed to root out just this kind of bad behavior and hold accountable those responsible.
In a prime position to flex their muscles under powers handed to them by the governor, the new state election investigators made some arrests focused on the lowest-level petition circulators. But efforts fizzled to go after the operators who orchestrated the petition campaign and paid circulators bonuses for signatures collected.
Those operatives had ties to DeSantis supporters, and opponents of the governor argue that the people in charge of the casino initiative were left alone by design.
Fast forward to this election. The state’s handling of the two-year-old case is raising new questions after the governor’s election police launched an unprecedented investigation into Amendment 4, an initiative DeSantis opposes. If approved by 60% of voters in November, it would throw out the six-week abortion ban DeSantis signed into law.
This time, the state police appear to be leaving no stone unturned.
DeSantis has said there’s been fraud in the petition drive for Amendment 4, including contractors paying circulators based on the number of signatures collected, a felony in Florida. His elections police are knocking on Floridians’ doors and reviewing tens of thousands of validated petitions, something elections officials said they’d never seen before.
“Our tolerance in the State of Florida for any type of election-related fraud is zero,” DeSantis said last week. “We are not going to put up with it.”
Opponents see the investigation as a last-ditch attempt to sully or disqualify the amendment two months before the election.
If the probe was truly about fraud, the same investigative efforts would have been applied to other petition drives, including the Las Vegas Sands initiative, said state Rep. Anna Eskamani, D-Orlando. That didn’t happen, she said.
“DeSantis is not going to hold his friends accountable to any standards,” she said.
Florida Democratic Party Chairwoman Nikki Fried said it was “shocking but not surprising” that the state is focused on the Amendment 4 petitions.
“The irony is that this story is the same kind of ‘selective prosecution’ of which Ron has falsely accused his political opponents,” Fried said in a statement.
READ MORE: What you need to know about the six constitutional amendments on Florida’s 2024 ballot
Compared to Las Vegas Sands’ 2021 petition drive, Amendment 4 had relatively few red flags — and it has none of the political connections.
Las Vegas Sands spent more than $70 million to expand gaming in the state but fell short of the required signatures to make the ballot. Its late founder, Sheldon Adelson, was a major Republican donor who backed DeSantis’ 2018 run for governor.
DeSantis also sought the endorsement — and money — of Adelson’s wife Miriam during his failed presidential run. The Adelsons and Las Vegas Sands have donated at least $500,000 to his campaigns.
One red flag in any signature drive is the rate of petitions accepted by supervisors.
For Amendment 4, supervisors validated about 68% of the petitions they received, a Herald/Times analysis shows. That’s about average for successful petition drives, according to supervisors and experts — and three percentage points better than this year’s amendment to legalize recreational marijuana. The state has not launched a broad investigation into that proposal, known as Amendment 3.
Supervisors reject petitions for a variety of reasons. The person might not be a registered voter. They might have moved or forgotten that they’ve already signed the petition. And petitions filled out by voters in parking lots might be too sloppy for supervisors to read.
“About a third [being rejected] is industry standard and not a sign of fraud or abuse,” said Steve Vancore, who has worked on petition efforts in Florida since the 1980s.
By comparison, the casino gaming effort’s acceptance rate was more than 30 percentage points lower, at about 37%, according to an analysis submitted in court records by the Seminole Tribe, which opposed Las Vegas Sands’ effort. The Seminole Tribe’s competing amendment that year had a 57% acceptance rate, according to the analysis.
A spokesperson for the American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, one of the organizations supporting Amendment 4, said their own data showed the validity rate for the abortion initiative was 69%.
“We believe that investigating petition signatures already certified by local election officials and the state is unprecedented government interference,” spokesperson Keisha Mulfort said in a statement.
Like ‘robbing Fort Knox’Florida’s Republican leaders and business groups have long sought to crack down on the constitutional amendment process, claiming it is riddled with fraud. In 2019, DeSantis signed into law legislation requiring circulators to register with the state and making it a misdemeanor to be paid by the signature. He’s since made it a felony.
After Las Vegas Sands launched its petition drive, supervisors across the state alerted law enforcement and state elections officials to suspicious signatures and extraordinarily high rejection rates. One supervisor found his and his wife’s signature forged.
The problem was so widespread that Laurel Lee, then overseeing the state’s elections system as secretary of state, suggested to Attorney General Ashley Moody that she seek an injunction to stop the circulators before the deadline to collect signatures.
By comparison, the Amendment 4 drive was relatively quiet.
DeSantis’ Department of State said it’s been investigating petition fraud since June last year. So far, police have arrested four petition circulators — the people who stand in parking lots or outside stores. They’re facing charges of forging people’s signatures or identity theft after investigators interviewed people who said they didn’t sign the petition.
(Since December, state police have arrested or issued warrants for two circulators working on behalf of the marijuana amendment, as well as five people who worked on the Las Vegas Sands initiative and one working on a different marijuana amendment.)
Still, a January deadline to challenge signatures came and went with no objections.
To collect signatures, the supporters of Amendment 4 hired California-based PCI Consultants, which has been working in Florida since 1998 and was behind the recent ballot amendments to legalize medical marijuana and restore voting rights to people with felony convictions.
The company’s president, Angelo Paparella, said they screened petitions before turning them in, flagging the ones they considered fraudulent. (All petitions collected must be turned in under state law.) One of the people arrested was first flagged by PCI Consultants, according to the woman’s arrest report.
Had the company been paying people per signature, it would have been obvious to the amendment’s opponents and supervisors, Paparella said. The woman who was arrested told police that she was told by a coworker at a subcontractor that she would be paid per signature.
“If we had done that, this thing would have blown up last year,” Paparella said. “The notion we could have gotten away with that, it would have been the equivalent of robbing Fort Knox.”
He added that he was happy if the state was finding people committing fraud, and he offered to help “any way I can.”
He said he hasn’t heard from anyone with the state.
Paying ‘bonuses’ per signatureIn the Las Vegas Sands case, several people said the effort was financed by a pay-per-signature scheme.
Lawyers for the Seminole Tribe produced contracts and affidavits from people who worked on Las Vegas Sands’ petition drive. One organizer told the Herald/Times at the time that he and others were offered “bonuses” of $2,500 for every 300 signatures, and he sent records to both the newspaper and the secretary of state.
In October 2022, Lee Vasche, the CEO of one of the companies paid to collect signatures, said in a deposition that he was being paid up to $15 per signature. The company paying him, September Group, is owned by conservative operatives with a history of working for Republicans.
Lawyers for the Florida Department of State and Office of Attorney General, which investigate and prosecute election fraud, attended Vasche’s deposition but did not charge him or the owners of September Group who hired him.
When asked why charges weren’t pursued, Moody’s statewide prosecutor, Nick Cox, said in a statement that the case was referred to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, which reports to DeSantis. Cox said he thought that because Vasche lived in another state, the department did not pursue charges, since extradition is “difficult to pursue.” At the time, the penalty was a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail.
Cox said allegations that politics played a part in the decision were “completely absurd and without merit.”
Spokespeople for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement did not respond to multiple emails requesting comment on Cox’s statement. The Department of State also did not respond to multiple emails requesting comment.
State law says it’s illegal to “compensate” any “entity or individual ... based on the number of petition forms gathered.”
Vasche’s circulators collected more than 500,000 signatures, he said in an affidavit. He said the circulators were paid an hourly rate — plus bonuses for the number of signatures collected. His company awarded one circulator a Nissan car, he said in a deposition.
Paying bonuses per signature was cleared by the operation’s lawyer, Vasche said in the deposition. In a separate 2022 affidavit, he said his company tried to clear it with the secretary of state multiple times, but the office never responded.
“It was apparent to me, at the time, that Florida either intended or wanted to insinuate the threat of prosecution for any effort to provide compensation to signature gatherers on any basis other than time worked,” he wrote.
Vasche’s Miami lawyer, Gerald Greenberg, said no one from the state ever followed up on Vasche’s testimony.
One of September Group’s co-owners, Tim Mooney, said neither his company nor Vasche’s broke the law. He said Florida law allows people to be paid bonuses based on the number of signatures they collect. Vasche’s company is also not considered an “entity” under the law, he said.
“We didn’t do anything illegal, and Lee [Vasche] didn’t do anything illegal,” Mooney said. “If we had, something more would have happened.”
Mooney, who lives in Arizona, was charged by Utah’s attorney general last year for paying people per signature, which he’s fighting.
The two charges are misdemeanors.
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