Signature gatherers are out in force across S.F. Here's why this year feels different

In some parts of San Francisco, it's virtually impossible to exit a grocery store without getting ambushed by people waving clipboards.

They are a familiar sight each election season, collecting signatures to put policy ideas before voters, lecturing anyone who will listen on why we need to fund buses or libraries, tax the rich and cut through the red tape. We've all heard versions of these speeches before, and we generally tolerate them, accepting ballot initiatives as an expression of the popular will. But this year the signature gatherers showed an unusual ferocity that crescendoed last week, when the state hit a suggested deadline for measures to qualify for November.

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And still the gatherers refused to pack up. Now the focus has shifted to local and regional campaigns, including roughly a dozen would-be ballot measures circulating in San Francisco. People who wrap up petition drives in Southern California cities caravan to the Bay Area and quickly memorize scripts about the importance of bailing out BART and Muni, streamlining city contracts in San Francisco, and the proposed expansion of Mayor Daniel Lurie's executive power. Voters can't catch a break.

"This year it's next-level," said David Burke, a Castro resident and civilian employee of the San Francisco Police Department, who has seen petitioners obstruct store entrances or follow people into traffic, not taking "no" for an answer.

Political insiders blamed this year's chaos on the amount of money that poured in, thanks to billionaire-supported campaigns like the one backed by Google co-founder Sergey Brin to defeat a prospective wealth tax. That infusion of cash caused signature pay rates to spike early - meaning well ahead of the typical May rush - and motivated gatherers to hustle harder. For many San Franciscans, the constant sales-pitching amounted to low-level harassment.

Just ask Kenny King. He encountered 14 ravenous petition circulators while walking a block from the Ferry Building to the Embarcadero transit station on a recent afternoon. Two of these workers approached King while he waited at a crosswalk. When he entered the station, another three were waiting on the Muni platform, brandishing pens and scripted speeches.

One boarded the N Judah train and began haranguing passengers.

"The ocean is going to collapse!" King heard the man yell, urging people to sign an initiative whose purpose wasn't immediately clear.

These roving workers have become avatars of a frenzied midterm election, as advocates press measures to tax billionaires, salvage public transit and other high-stakes questions. Between January and March, gatherers could have clipboards up to 10 statewide measures thick that had reached 25% of their signature requirements. Merchants have called police to forcibly remove circulators who stand in doorways or set up tables in parking lots. Staff at BART have sent warning letters to signature gatherers who accost people on trains, in violation of the transit agency's rules.

"Guilt-tripping people to sign something on a train, that's just a real pain," King said, voicing a complaint that many San Franciscans would echo. Sure, city dwellers love civic engagement, and mostly empathize with people toiling away at a rather thankless job. But riders trying to get home on the N Judah also value their personal space. And the guy wailing about the ocean had decided to violate it.

The gatherers - who sometimes come from as far as Florida to work the California signature circuit - represent a vibe and a moment, an inchoate sense of things breaking down and needing to be overhauled. In their sheer ubiquity and aggressive salesmanship, the workers also reveal something larger about California's electoral process: that it's become an industry unto itself.

A ballot measure that begins as a grassroots campaign run by scrappy volunteers will inevitably become grist for big business. Specialized agencies manage the initiatives, signing contracts pledging the measure's makers to deliver the hundreds of thousands of John Hancocks needed to get a measure in front of voters. Those agencies outsource to another subset of companies that work with their own network of professional signature-gatherers, who specialize in the craft of pestering passersby.

Gatherers either get paid by the hour - in which case they are held to stringent quotas - or more often by the signature, with rates driven by market demand, state deadlines and urgency to get an initiative on the ballot. Though pay usually starts at $6 per signature, it can climb quickly in a crowded cycle, as companies jockey for the same pool of workers. A 2022 referendum on the state law banning flavored tobacco products holds the record for highest pay per signature, at nearly $22 a pop, according to data compiled by Ballotpedia. Rates surged nearly that high for this year's competing billionaire tax measures - one seeking to extract a one-time, 5% tax from California's wealthiest residents, two others aiming to torpedo the idea. Brin sponsored one of the counter-measures.

All three had hit their targets by April. Once they pass initial screenings, election workers will check each for 874,641 valid signatures before the initiatives can be printed on November ballots.

"That capitalists win on this," said political campaign consultant Andrew Acosta. "And the guy at Safeway with 12 cards wins, too."

Acosta saw the insane price inflation up close. This cycle one firm quoted him $1.5 million to collect 30,000 signatures for a local Sacramento petition. That's not normal, he said.

As signature-gathering becomes more cutthroat and transactional, it caters to a certain personality type.

"It really takes a specific temperament," said San Francisco political consultant Daniel Anderson, explaining that most paid gatherers love the grind, enjoy sparring for turf at transit stations or grocery store parking lots and crave the dopamine rush of a hard-earned payday. Some have formed a nomadic tribe, wandering from state to state and election to election, learning all the arcane rules of ballot qualification in different places even if they struggle to explain the measures they are hired to shepherd. The shrewdest gatherers choose their petitions strategically, trying to get the ones with good, clear hooks, like a tax for billionaires to fund healthcare. A catchy initiative can be used to reel people in and persuade them to sign a wonkier measure - say, a city charter amendment - which might actually pay more.

There are, indeed, times when the grassroots advocates "get uncomfortable with the conduct of the paid gatherers," Anderson said, describing the awkward tension between people earnestly fighting to get something on the ballot, and their counterparts who just want to make a quick buck.

Advocates are in a tough spot, Anderson explained, "because they really need those signatures." He offered an analogy: "It's as though you really want a hamburger, but you don't want to acknowledge that it's from a cow slaughtered at a factory farm in Iowa."

To vet all those factory-farmed signatures, county election officials have to assiduously cross-check each name with signatures the state has on file for every voter. The election workers are trained by a hand-writing forensic specialist to verify the signatures, said San Luis Obispo County Clerk-Recorder Elaina Cano. Cano's office was thrust into a frenzy this petition cycle when a March video recorded in San Francisco showed signature-gatherers paying people $5 to sign the names of some of her county's voters.

Cano called the apparent case of signature fraud shocking, but said she was confident the fake signatures would have been caught by her office. Workers have access to years' worth of signatures and are trained to understand how they may change over time.

"If we ever doubt a signature, we try to reach out to that voter multiple times, send them a letter, and send them instructions on how to cure their signature so we can continue the process," Cano said.

Mindful that some names won't qualify, signature-gatherers often try to exceed the threshold to put a measure on the ballot. Most work in bulk.

All of these dynamics might explain the desperation of the man trying to balance his sheaves of paper on a moving N Judah train, ranting end-of-the-world rhetoric to a trapped audience. In King's recollection, several passengers winced and tried not to make eye contact. A few grudgingly signed the man's petitions, mostly to get him to move on.

Petitioners say the resentment goes both ways.

"Some guy at the farmer's market gave me the finger," said Ebony Hassell, who was collecting signatures outside the Safeway at Market and Church streets on a recent afternoon. She and two others arrived at the store with a fold-out table and bundles of paper in separate Tupperware containers. They squeezed their work station between planter boxes and rows of shopping carts, calling out to everyone who walked by.

About one in every 10 people looked up. Hassell plastered a smile on her face, ignoring the sting of rejection.

"There are people who clutch their purse tighter when they see me," she said, speculating that these more extreme reactions might stem from racial bias, because she and her co-workers are Black. "There are people who think we are asking for money," she added, "or trying to steal their information."

And then there are people who stop and talk, either to socialize with Hassell or incite a political debate. After a while, it becomes unclear who is holding who captive. Occasionally, the chatty people leave without signing anything. Hassell shrugs them off. She declined to state how much she is paid per signature, or whether she is bound to a quota.

At a Noe Valley Whole Foods, employees said they called police at least four times in 20 days after signature-gatherers refused to leave the premises. Officers who responded had to mediate a verbal standoff between the gatherers, who defended their right to be there, and store workers who insisted they were trespassing. In every case, the gatherers eventually gave up and left.

One manager described being self-conscious about having "to be some Karen," but said he couldn't risk being liable for people camped out on the store's property.

King, who lives in Duboce Triangle, has tried to keep an open mind about all the signature gatherers roaming his neighborhood, and all the issues they seek to promote. About six weeks ago he stopped at a table outside a Walgreens, perused the crates of paper with their ballot measure descriptions, and "spent 15 minutes signing everything."

He signed two more petitions last week, when a clipboard-bearing man sauntered up to him in Duboce Park.

"I appreciated that he only had two clipboards, so I thought he might be more on the grassroots element," King said, in a tone of weary surrender. "I thanked him for being part of our process."

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This story was originally published May 10, 2026 at 10:36 AM.