Gates cries foul over recall signature check

Secretary of State Dean Heller has ordered that all 7,474 signatures of a failed petition to recall County Commission Chairwoman Yvonne Atkinson Gates be verified "to validate the random-sampling process."

Heller made the announcement Tuesday, two weeks after he had rejected the petition filed by Citizens for Honest and Responsible Government for failing to generate enough valid signatures out of a computer-generated sample of 503.

Gates said she resented being a "guinea pig" for testing state law.

"I feel that it is unjustified and unfair for my constituents in District D," Gates said. "It is damaging for them to use this recall effort as a test-case guinea pig, so to speak."

The verification work is scheduled to begin Monday. Processing all the signatures on the 959-page petition will take at least a week, require the work of 15 staff members in the election department and cost upward of $60,000.

"This is the most thorough way we know of validating the process," Heller said, noting it was the first time in the five years the appeal process has been on the books that the secretary's rejection was challenged.

Heller said he didn't want to wait until a much larger petition -- involving worker's rights or medicinal use of marijuana, for example -- tested the procedures "so we don't have to validate every petition in the future."

The group had filed the appeal on the basis that the random sampling was unconstitutional, that its members were not allowed access to view the verification process and that Ferguson had a conflict of interest because she worked for Gates and the other six commissioners.

Heller said he was not addressing whether the 13-year-old statute requiring the random sampling was constitutional.

"We're saying that it is," Heller said.

Heller said his decision should not be interpreted as doubting the way the random sample was taken.

"Had the appeal occurred in Washoe County or Carson City, we would have done the same thing," he said. "It just so happened that the appeal happened in Clark County."

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