Why is Matos still on the ballot?

Even though local election officials rejected about 30% of the signatures that the Matos campaign submitted, roughly 720 were accepted. Candidates needed only 500 to qualify for a spot on the ballot.

It’s unclear how many of those 720 signatures would hold up to scrutiny. But officials seem to be operating under the assumption that Matos had a large enough cushion.

“I’m confident that the Matos campaign received the 500 signatures needed to access the ballot,” Secretary of State Gregg Amore told The Providence Journal. Although reporters have located a few people who say their signatures were faked, “I’m not aware of that being a widespread issue,” he said.

Once signatures are validated on the local level, the secretary of state’s job is to certify the count – “basically, confirming that the number of signatures on each sheet matches what has been reported by the board of canvassers,” Chybowski said – and then print the ballots.

But as Rhode Island Republican National Committeeman Steve Frias pointed out on Twitter, state law also allows the secretary of state to determine if “the nomination papers or the signatures on them are invalid or insufficient,” and disqualify candidates.

In an interview, Amore suggested that doing so would be inappropriate. “The last thing that we want an elected official like myself to do is to be determining the legitimacy of signatures,” he said, later adding that he thinks that the Board of Elections has the ability to conduct its own review.

It’s not clear that the Board of Elections agrees: After numerous inquiries, the board issued a statement saying that signature verification is conducted by local officials who “did their job.” Through its spokesman, Christopher Hunter, the board declined to explain why there was no attempt to re-examine Matos’ signatures after discrepancies emerged.

Stephen Erickson, who formerly served as the board’s vice chairman, argues that the board “functions, essentially, as a court” and that its job is to adjudicate appeals, not conduct investigations. But Marion contends that the law makes “crystal clear” that the board has the authority to review local officials’ work.

“Given all of the evidence from multiple communities that there were problems, they should have reviewed all of Matos’ signatures and come to an independent conclusion about whether she had submitted the required number of signatures,” he said.

Is the process too rushed?

Erickson suggested rethinking the “highly compressed” timeline. He pointed out that the final day for candidates to contest signatures was also the last day before the “drop-dead” deadline to mail primary ballots to military and overseas voters, or else run afoul of federal law.

“It’s a much more compressed process than with mail ballots, and that makes a difference in terms of how thoroughly certain things can be investigated,” he said.

Frias, similarly, said that requiring election officials to validate signatures in such a short amount of time “makes it difficult to catch fraudulent signatures.” He also suggested that extending the signature collection period would make it less likely that “a desperate campaign” would engage in fraud.

“Basically, candidates have less than two weeks to collect signatures and local boards have about a week after the filing deadline to review them,” Frias said. In other states, there’s more turnaround time, he said.

Election officials interviewed for this story also generally agree that it would help to have more time to verify signatures, though they don’t accept the notion that fraud is getting overlooked because the process is too rushed.

“I’m not sure it would have made a difference here,” Amore said. But, he added, “if the process is extended, it takes pressure off all of the stakeholders, and, I think, probably builds confidence.”