The health care training campaign, I-1163,  alerted the secretary of state's office to fraudulent signatures in its own batch of petitions.

1163 is the Service Employees International Union measure to mandate state-funded training for its long-term home care workers.

The Secretary of State's election division sent out the following statement this morning:

The state Elections Division has requested the Washington State Patrol to investigate a number of Initiative 1163 petition signatures that appear to be fraudulent. None of the signatures were included in the estimated 340,000 signatures submitted to the Secretary of State on July 8, and the signature-gathering company self-reported the problem.

Initiative 1163 spokesperson Sandeep Kaushik told our office that I-1163’s signature-gathering firm, PCI, realized that it had a number of signatures that they suspected to be fraudulent. The California-based PCI sent the questionable signatures to our Elections Division, which has reviewed them, finding that most of the signatures did not match the signature on file, or were names of voters not found on the voter rolls.

The matter has been turned over to the Washington State Patrol, which has agreed to investigate.

SEIU, which helped gather signatures for last year's high-earners' income tax measure, got into trouble for fraudulent signatures during that campaign when an SEIU member admitted submitting hundreds of faked signatures. The high-earners' income tax campaign also used the California-based signature gathering firm PCI, paying them nearly $600,ooo. The 1163 campaign, solely funded by SEIU's $1.3 million contribution, spent $1 million on PCI's signature-gathering efforts this year.

In related news, Tim Eyman's initiative, I-1125 (which regulates tolling), qualified for the ballot, "setting a record for the best validity rate in state history," according to an Eyman email blast, at 92 percent. The 1125 campaign, funded by more than $1 million in contributions from anti-light rail Eastside developer Kemper Freeman, paid more than $1 million to a Lacey signature gathering firm, Citizen Solutions Inc. Freeman supports Eyman's initiative because it would thwart light rail across I-90 by requiring that tolls be used for construction projects on the roads on which they're levied.

I had to check out Eyman's boast. Here's what Dave Ammons, spokesman for the secretary of state, says:

"We haven’t validated the measure yet and may not until Monday. [Eyman] was using the error rate from a daily report on the random check that is now underway.  If it holds up, he will have an unusually clean error rate, which typically runs 18 percent on the average" —or 82 percent validity.