This is why I rarely sign petitions and when I do I make sure I read the text on the page carefully. Never sign a page that doesn't have the text of the petition at the top. Also note that electronic petitions are pretty much worthless because it is trivial to copy the names onto unrelated petitions or reverse the sense of what you are signing (you think you're signing a gay-rights petition and instead they submit it as an anti-gay-marriage petition). Only when standards for digital signatures by authentic individuals (ie. no cheating) have infrastructure in place and are in common practice will electronic petitions be trustable (and then they'll be more secure than paper petitions, so stunts like this bait-and-switch won't be possible).I hope the anti-gay-marriage petition gets invalidated, but I doubt the case will get settled soon enough and it might not address whether that petition would have failed to get enough signatures had deception not been used; the case is brought by the horsies group because the signature gathering company's deliberate fraud stole their signatures for the higher profits of the other petition and left them short of having enough (while still presumably charging for the horsie signatures they did collect, taking their money in bad faith), so they have no particular legal standing on invalidating the other petition.
The article doesn't indicate whether the number of suspected stolen signatures would have kept the anti-gay-marriage petition from having enough without the deception. It might be that there are enough ignorant people who support that petition to have done it anyway, especially as there were enough ignorant people even in a state like California to pass a stupid measure like that. It's possible that the homophobes knew of or approve of the deception (they aren't crying about the extra money they were charged for signatures obtained by deception), but it could be tough to prove bad-faith on their part to invalidate their petition (unless the stolen signatures are the difference between enough and not); we can hope though that this'll hurt public perception of them and make it less likely to pass.
But hopefully the signature gathering company will have its license(?) suspended or be barred from such activity for some significant period of time (at least one or two election cycles) and/or have a huge punitive fine (paid to the state) for violation of the public trust.
Maybe a law will get passed requiring such companies to charge equal rates for signatures, so they have no financial incentive to commit such fraud. Of course, some people will still have personal reasons to commit such deception, and it might be a lot harder to catch and prove.
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"Don't hurt the horsies!"