They hang around store entrances, shoving papers into our faces and telling us lies to entice us to sign their petitions. They are bounty hunters people paid for each signature they collect and each voter registration card they turn in.

Depending on their clients, our signatures or voter registration cards are worth $1 to $10.

Most "grass-roots" initiatives are expensive special interest campaigns that rely on bounty hunters to harass people into signing petitions to qualify measures to be placed on ballots and later sold to voters.

It's a big business for political consultants who with straight faces describe the process as democracy at its best because it gives power to the people.

Actually it gives big bucks to political consultants who qualify measures for the ballot and run campaigns. It costs about $1 million to qualify a measure. Consultants earn much more to run campaigns.

Rather than giving us democracy at its finest, it often gives us corruption. Investigations are under way in Orange, Riverside and San Bernardino counties, where bounty hunters allegedly switched people's voter registrations from Democrat to Republican. Clients wanted more Republicans registered and were willing to pay.

Democrat and Republican voter registration drives throughout the state, including in Kern County, have been plagued by this kind of fraud.

Sen. Debra Bowen, D-Redondo Beach, has introduced two bills to combat it. SB 1598 requires people circulating initiative petitions to disclose the measure's five largest contributors. SB 1047 bans paying petition initiative or voter registration signature gatherers on a per-signature basis.

"If people are getting paid $10 for every signature they get on an initiative petition or for every voter registration card they collect, they have an incentive to defraud the system in a way that a volunteer or someone making $10 an hour doesn't," Bowen explains.

With their bread often buttered by these same political consultants, state lawmakers have rejected earlier efforts to reform the process.

This time, Bowen has patterned her ban on per-signature payment after an Oregon law voters passed overwhelmingly in 2002.

Now that's a good use of the initiative process. If California lawmakers again balk at reform, turn to voters. Place a measure on the ballot to curb proposition abuses and fraudulent bounty hunters.

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