On the afternoon of June 4, while sitting on a park bench in downtown Lincoln, Nebraska, Abby Mitchell noticed three men holding clipboards and pens gathering signatures for a Republican-led ballot petition to enshrine mandatory voter identification as part of the state constitution.
“One of them approached me and asked me if I was in support of voters showing their IDs,” Mitchell told The Daily Beast. “When I indicated I was not, he said I could still sign the petition, but that he would jot down that I was opposed.”
Mitchell, a 42-year-old instructional designer, declined to sign the petition—which needs 124,000 signatures to be on the ballot in November. “That was very strange to me and not how petitions are conducted,” she said.
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Mitchell is among nearly a dozen Nebraskans who have reported bizarre encounters with petition circulators to the elections watchdog group Civic Nebraska and Secretary of State Robert Evnen over the past month—reports which have now sparked a police investigation.
Last week, some Nebraskans posted on social media cellphone footage of their interactions with petition circulators allegedly not abiding by state law regulating signature gathering. The complaints describe and the video clips show unknown operatives of Citizens For Voter ID engaging in what appear to be misleading tactics and saying just about anything except what the proposed ballot measure actually does in an effort to secure the necessary signatures from registered voters.
Citizens for Voter ID is a political action committee spearheaded by Republican state Sen. Julie Slama and bankrolled by the mother of Nebraska Gov. Pete Ricketts.
To manage the ballot effort, the PAC hired Vanguard Field Strategies, the Austin, Texas-based GOP firm that was in charge of gathering signatures for James Craig, a Republican gubernatorial candidate in Michigan who likely will not appear on that state’s primary ballot after thousands of signatures on his petition were deemed fraudulent.
John Cartier, voting rights director for Civic Nebraska, accused Citizens for Voter ID circulators of engaging in an unprecedented misinformation campaign.
“Some of them are just flat-out lying about what voters are signing,” Cartier said. “The company, Vanguard, just got in trouble in Michigan. There is something obviously wrong with their signature gathering and code of ethics.”
Cartier said he also received an ominous text message from an unknown phone number shortly after Civic Nebraska released an alert suggesting voters video record their interactions with circulators and share them with the watchdog group. He sent The Daily Beast a screenshot of the message, which read: “Hi John. We are recording you and collecting data on you too. And yes, we know what you did.”
Cartier’s text response: “Well, I know what you did last summer.”
The Daily Beast has learned that Nebraska’s top law enforcement agency is investigating whether any crimes have been committed by Citizens for Voter ID. According to a June 2 email from Nebraska State Patrol Det. Sgt. Stacie Lundgren, she is investigating a complaint originally sent to Evnen in late May by state Sen. Carol Blood, a Democratic gubernatorial nominee. Evnen forwarded her complaint to Nebraska Attorney General Doug Peterson.
Blood alleged she was approached by a male petition circulator claiming to be with the state of Nebraska outside a Bed, Bath & Beyond store. She also claimed a female signature-gatherer was doing the same thing in front of a Starbucks. “I told him and her that I was reporting them to the secretary of state because they were not with the state of Nebraska,” Blood told The Daily Beast in a recent interview. “In Nebraska, it's a crime to impersonate or pretend to be a representative of any organization for personal benefit. These circulators get paid by the signature.”
According to the June 2 email, which sought more information from Blood about the encounter, Lundgren says Peterson’s office requested that she investigate the state senator’s allegations. In an email response to The Daily Beast on Lundgren’s behalf, Nebraska State Patrol spokesperson Cody Thomas referred questions to Peterson.
Suzanne Gage, Peterson’s spokesperson, said she cannot confirm or deny whether any complaints sent to the attorney general have been referred for criminal investigation.
Following the lead of successful Republican efforts in other states requiring voters to present valid identification before casting ballots, Slama and Citizens for Voter ID launched the petition drive last summer. In order to make it on the November ballot, the committee must collect signatures from 10 percent of registered voters—roughly 124,000 signatures— by July 7.
At the time the initiative launched, Slama, who proposed a voter ID bill that failed to get out of committee during the most recent legislative session, said “Nebraskans want voter ID, and special interests do not.”
Arguments for requiring identification in Nebraska elections don’t hold up because there is hardly any evidence of widespread voter fraud in the state, Blood told the Daily Beast. In February, Evnen, a Republican, sent a PowerPoint presentation to all 49 state senators debunking allegations of fraud and irregularities during the 2020 election made by the Nebraska Voter Accuracy Project, including a false claim that 4,001 votes could not be linked to registered voters.
“We have real fraud taking place in the streets in order to prevent fraud that is not happening in Nebraska,” Blood said. “It is a weird dichotomy.”
According to the committee’s campaign filings, Marlene Ricketts, the billionaire co-owner of the Chicago Cubs and wife of former Ameritrade chairman John Ricketts, donated $376,000 to Citizens for Voter ID on July 13, 2021. The committee received one other contribution: $1,000 from former congressman and ex-Omaha Mayor Hal Daub.
Of the committee’s haul, $326,000 was used to pay Vanguard for signature-gathering services, the finance reports show. The committee also paid $71,000 in consulting fees to Axiom Strategies, Vanguard’s parent company and the national political consulting firm recently credited with assisting Republican Glenn Youngkin's victory in the 2021 Virginia gubernatorial election.
Gov. Ricketts issued a statement last year supporting the ballot initiative and he has also praised Georgia’s passage of a law requiring valid photo identification for absentee ballots: “Nebraska stands with Georgia and supports their work to promote integrity and access in voting.”
In 2019, Ricketts appointed Slama, then just 22, to the Nebraska Legislature to replace Sen. Dan Watermeier when he became a member of the state’s Public Service Commission. A year earlier, Slama served as press secretary for Ricketts’ re-election campaign. Last year, Ricketts appointed Slama’s twin sister as elections commissioner of Sarpy County.
Alex Reuss, a spokesperson for Gov. Ricketts, did not respond to requests for comment. Slama did not return two voicemails on her cellphone and did not respond to requests for an interview through a Citizens for Voter ID media liaison. Vanguard President Joe Williams and Tom Goodson, the firm’s national director of data and operations, also did not respond to requests for comment via email.
In interviews with the Omaha World-Herald, Slama said complaints about sketchy circulators “were very isolated” and did not represent the hundreds of signature-gatherers working across Nebraska. If any of the incidents were found to be true, she said, those employees and volunteers would face consequences, including termination.
Slama recently claimed allegations are part of a “Democrat-led hit job” to discredit the petition drive—but at least one person to lodge a complaint about signature hounds pretending to be state employees is a Republican politician.
Former State Sen. Shelley Kiel told the Nebraska Examiner that a young woman came by her house in the Dundee area of Omaha asking her to sign the voter ID petition. Kiel claimed the woman said, “I’m from the State of Nebraska.”
The woman twice responded affirmatively when Kiel asked her if she was sure she was a state employee, according to the Examiner. Another female circulator who spoke to Kiel’s husband claimed to work for the Secretary of State’s Office, Kiel said.
About three weeks ago, the elections watchdog group Civic Nebraska sent out an alert warning state voters about the signature-collection tactics. “These kinds of aggressive tactics, while concerning, are not new, even for a petition that supporters repeatedly purport is a slam dunk,” the alert said. “You can always record petition circulators, call our election protection line, email us, or tag us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram with questions or concerns about petition circulators.”
Since the end of May, Civic Nebraska has received emails from half a dozen Nebraska voters recounting their experiences with petition circulators, including a woman who claimed she “may have wrongfully signed” the petition because the circulator told her multiple times that it was against requiring voters to provide identification. (That woman did not respond to an email request for an interview.)
Margaret Badura, a 71-year-old attorney who emailed Cartier a complaint, told the Daily Beast that a signature-gatherer dropped by her home in the Omaha suburb of Papillion on May 31. “After she gave me her spiel, I told her I thought this voter ID law was unnecessary because the voting system does have checks and balances in place,” Badura recalled in a phone interview. “She became somewhat aggressive in telling me that I was wrong.”
The visitor proceeded to claim that she had presented herself to polling sites in Nebraska using fictitious names and poll workers didn’t verify who she was, Badura alleged.
“I don’t know if she was telling the truth,” Badura said. “But I told her she likely committed crimes and could go to jail. She got really huffy, spun around, and left.”
