In February 2022, a group of petition circulators arrived in Colorado to gather signatures for Republican political campaigns.

They worked for Grassfire LLC, a Wyoming-based petition and canvassing firm. The circulators’ job: Collect enough signatures for three candidates to make the ballot in their respective races. One targeted an open congressional seat anchored in Jefferson County. The other two concerned a statehouse candidate and a sheriff hopeful, both in Douglas County.

Investigators later would charge six of these circulators with forging signatures on two of the campaigns, using dead and out-of-state voters to fill their quotas.

That same month, 1,600 miles away, Florida authorities announced a statewide investigation into widespread fraud concerning a constitutional initiative to expand gambling. Election supervisors told the secretary of state they had thousands of invalid signatures streaming into their offices.

Now the Florida Department of Law Enforcement is probing the campaign, and regional state attorneys have filed charges against circulators — with more likely on the way.

The one commonality behind the two states’ investigations: Grassfire.

The now-defunct company garnered widespread attention last month after Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser announced felony charges against the six circulators. But a Denver Post review found the company also has been accused of malfeasance in Florida, with at least three other Grassfire workers convicted of similar charges related to forging signatures.

Former workers say the firm’s owner, Lee Vasche, directed them to break the law in Florida, including by instructing them to shred petitions that likely would be deemed invalid. Circulators told authorities that they were paid per signature collected — a practice outlawed in Florida.

Florida election officials, meanwhile, grew astonished by the number of signature forgeries they saw during the bitter 2021 campaign, which pitted monied Las Vegas casino interests against the Seminole Tribe.

“I’d never seen anything like this,” said Wesley Wilcox, the supervisor of elections in Florida’s Marion County. He turned in 600 suspected forgeries to investigators — including fraudulent petitions submitted with his and his wife’s signatures. “There was no real deep thought in this — it was just a numbers game it seemed like.”

Vasche declined to be interviewed for this story. In a statement through his attorney, the Grassfire owner said the opposition paid its contractors to switch sides and make “baseless, politically motivated accusations against the campaign.”

Nobody at Grassfire has spoken with Florida investigators, Vasche said in the statement, but “we have fully cooperated with every request those investigators have made of us.”

The Florida and Colorado cases underscore the dark underbelly of American political campaigns and the legions of laborers who ensure candidates or referendums make the ballot. The charges and ongoing investigation also highlight the financial incentives that underpin signature-gathering — and whether those cash carrots invite fraud.

“We did not see anything political about it,” Mike Hogan, then-supervisor of elections in Duval County, Florida, told reporters in December 2021 after two Grassfire circulators were arrested. “It was… people who were greedy. There’s an incentive there to get as many as you can in.”

Rampant signature fraud roils 2021 petition efforts

Grassfire was one of several firms contracted in 2021 by a political committee, Florida Voters in Charge, with the goal of putting a contentious gambling expansion measure on the ballot. And the money was serious.

Las Vegas Sands, a casino and resort company, pumped in more than $70 million to bankroll the measure, which would have opened the door to Vegas-style casinos in north Florida.

The Seminole Tribe, though, controls a monopoly over gambling in the state and spent at least $40 million itself to combat the initiative.

In order to propose amendments to the Florida Constitution, groups are required to turn in signatures equal to 8% of the votes cast in the last presidential election. In 2021, that magic number was close to 900,000. (In Colorado, groups need at least 5% of the total number of votes cast for all secretary of state candidates during the previous election to get a statewide initiative petition or constitutional amendment on the ballot. That required number stands at 124,238 signatures until 2026).

Campaigns normally turn in more signatures than necessary since a certain percentage inevitably will be deemed invalid due to missing information or signatures that don’t match voter files. Election officials say they usually see 70% validity rates.

But toward the end of the 2021 campaign, with Florida Voters in Charge rushing to make the ballot, counties saw the number of invalid petitions skyrocket.

“By the end of the cycle they were in the 20% acceptance rate” or worse, said Wilcox. “They were turning in 100 and all of them — or 99 of them — would be a signature that doesn’t match.”

Wilcox grew especially alarmed when an employee showed him submitted petitions with his and his wife’s names scrawled on them. They never signed.

“It was quite shocking,” he said. “It wasn’t even an attempt at a facsimile of my signature — they didn’t really care.”

In early December 2021, Wilcox and election supervisors from five other north Florida counties sent a host of suspected forged petitions, and the names of more than a dozen circulators, to the Florida secretary of state. The petitions represented “widespread and continuing criminal acts,” the office’s counsel wrote in a letter to the state attorney general.

The AG’s office directed the statewide prosecutor to work with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and state attorney’s offices on a criminal investigation.

The Florida Secretary of State’s Office confirmed that it has received complaints regarding Grassfire and conducted “preliminary investigations into allegations made against petition circulators associated with Grassfire.” A spokesperson told The Denver Post that investigators referred potential violations to the attorney general and the Florida Department of Law Enforcement.

Those agencies would not divulge any additional details, citing the ongoing investigation.

Charges, though, already have been filed in some cases — including against at least three Grassfire circulators.

Two men in November 2021 were charged in Jacksonville with fraudulently registering more than 60 people to vote, including 10 individuals who already were dead. The same men later pleaded guilty to forging signatures for a constitutional amendment petition.

The state attorney’s office said at the time that their motivation appeared to be for monetary gain, not political.

Vasche, Grassfire’s owner, told a Jacksonville TV station that his firm hired the two individuals to work as petitioners, not on voter registration. The company, he said, fully assisted law enforcement and provided all documentation they had on the two workers.

Six months before the Jacksonville arrests, another Grassfire circulator was charged in Highlands County, Florida, for turning in more than 400 fraudulent petitions — including the forged signature of a local elections official. The man pleaded no contest and received probation.

Florida Voters in Charge contracted with several firms on the gambling measure, not just Grassfire. And authorities are honing in on them, too.

A St. Petersberg woman, paid by a group called Metropolitan Strategy and Solutions, was arrested in May and accused of forging hundreds of signatures during the campaign, the Miami Herald reported. The woman was one of 21 circulators who submitted petitions for Florida Voters in Charge who were investigated by the Pinellas-Pasco State Attorney’s Office, the newspaper reported. Prosecutors filed charges in many of the cases this spring.

“Shred ’em, make them disappear”

The rancorous campaign ended up in court at the end of 2021, with both sides hurling accusations against the other.

Florida Voters in Charge sued the Seminole-backed committee, Standing Up for Florida, and its operators, alleging the group was harassing and intimidating its signature gatherers. The December 2021 complaint also accused the committee of paying off Florida Voters in Charge’s petition circulators to ensure they didn’t perform their duties.

Standing Up for Florida countered that the Las Vegas Sands-backed committee engaged in all sorts of illegal behavior. Specifically, it accused Grassfire and its ownership of overtly skirting Florida election law.

Larry Laws began working with Grassfire in June 2021. As part of their agreement, Law’s firm, L&R Solutions, would provide Grassfire with petition circulators and managers to collect forms supporting the gambling initiative.

Florida law states all petitions gathered must be turned in to election offices. But Laws and two other Grassfire employees testified that Vasche instructed them to shred petitions that likely were fraudulent or missing information.

Laws told The Post he was given a full cardboard box with four or five thousand petitions. Vasche “asked me to get rid of them,” he said.

“Shred ’em, make them disappear,” Laws said he was told. “Like they were never there.”

Laws, a 25-year veteran of political campaigns, knew this was illegal.

“But it’s politics,” he said. “There’s a whole lot of illegal (expletive) that goes on.”

Laws consulted a lawyer, who told him to send the petitions to the secretary of state.

Tina Frazier, a former Grassfire office manager, outlined in the lawsuit a bin system that Grassfire would use to sort petitions with missing information. The bins were labeled: “Name,” “out of state” and “address” among others. Another one was simply called “trash,” she said.

Vasche would direct Frazier and others to look up the voter information and fill in the missing sections, Frazier said in her affidavit filed with the lawsuit.

“When petitions were illegible or could not be fixed, instead of submitting those to the state, (Vasche) would direct me to place them in a ‘trash’ box,” Frazier alleged. When the box filled to 1,000 petitions, Vasche instructed them to be shredded, she said in the affidavit.

The owner would then allegedly take the bag of shredded documents to throw out near his apartment complex so they wouldn’t be tossed in the dumpsters near Grassfire’s office, Frazier said in the court document.

Why not turn in everything, even the bad petitions? Money, the lawsuit contends.

If Grassfire and other contractors fail to maintain a 70% validity rate for their signatures, they would be required to reimburse money per deficient signature, according to a copy of an agreement included in the motion.

Vasche, in a deposition included in the court document, denied asking Laws to destroy petitions.

“We submit every possible signature that is from a valid Florida voter because that’s how we are compensated,” he said.

But he added the likely fraudulent petitions or ones with “fatal errors” become “sort of a quagmire for us.”

“Dealing with those problem petitions has been a nonstop headache for us from the beginning,” Vasche said in the deposition.

Frazier and Laws also testified that Vasche and Grassfire instituted an illegal pay-per-signature scheme for its circulators, a practice outlawed in Florida.

A circulator agreement on Grassfire’s website shows workers were promised an hourly wage but could collect bonuses based on the number of signatures they collect. The more signatures, the higher the bonus.

However, if a circulator failed to collect enough signatures, their worked hours would be cut, Frazier alleged.

Laws and Frazier both spoke to state investigators about the illegal activity. In an interview, Laws said authorities were particularly interested in the pay-per-signature aspect along with the petition shredding.

A spokesperson for the office of the state attorney said he could not comment on pending investigations.

Grassfire sued Laws in November 2021, alleging he took money from the Seminoles to sabotage their campaign. A federal judge rejected the company’s request for a permanent restraining order.

Vasche, in his statement to The Post, said Laws even asked him if he’d be willing to take money to help sabotage the operation, an offer he says he declined. Laws disputed any allegations of sabotage, saying it was simply a business decision for him to switch teams.

“The fact is Grassfire completed its work in Florida in compliance with the law despite significant financial incentives to drop the work,” Vasche said.

Incentive for fraud or First Amendment violation?

Florida is one of seven states that prohibit campaigns from paying signature gatherers based on the number of signatures collected.

Lawmakers, during debate over House Bill 5 in 2019, said the compensation structure incentivizes fraud by encouraging circulators to scribble as many signatures as possible in the name of money.

“We don’t allow people to do that because it corrupts the process,” Rep. Mike Beltran told a Florida TV station in 2021.

Colorado briefly had a similar law on the books, only for a federal judge to rule the statute unconstitutional. Elected officials in 2009 cited the same reasons as in Florida when they passed HB09-132.

“The per-signature compensation system used by many petition entities provides an incentive for circulators to collect as many signatures as possible, without regard for whether all petition signers are registered electors,” the bill stated.

A broad spectrum of political players immediately challenged the law, arguing the legislature simply wanted to make it more difficult, and expensive, for citizens to place measures on the ballot.

A federal judge in 2013 agreed, ruling that Colorado’s law posed “an undue restriction” on First Amendment rights.

Suspicious petitions are not a new phenomenon. But the issue made significant waves last year when five Republican gubernatorial candidates in Michigan were removed from the ballot for submitting at least 68,000 invalid signatures.

Experts point to rising signature prices in recent years — in some cases going from $2 or $3 a signature to $30 a pop — as one possible reason for increased fraud.

State Senate President Steve Fenberg told The Post he would support reviving the pay-per-signature provision, but that the court ruling makes it settled law.

The legislature did pass a bill this session that probits a petitioning entity from circulating ballot petitions if the entity or principal has been convicted of certain crimes. The bill, SB23-276, also increased penalties for petition entities that violated state law.

But Jena Griswold, Colorado’s secretary of state, wanted the law to hold people who run the companies accountable for employee violations, which did not make it into statute. Currently, prosecutors need to prove an entity — such as Grassfire — “knowingly” allowed fraud.

The Colorado attorney general, pointedly, did not charge Grassfire or its operators with a crime.

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