SF Group Caught Paying $5 Per Signature for Fake Petitions

A local content creator’s video may have cracked open a significant voter fraud investigation at one of San Francisco’s most vulnerable corners.

JJ Smith posted footage on March 9 showing a group of paid signature collectors on Sixth Street near Mission, directing people to sign ballot petitions using names and addresses that weren’t their own. In the video, Smith approaches someone waiting in a line and asks what’s going on. The man tells him people are getting paid $5 a signature. Smith steps up to the table and starts filming.

“So, what is it?” he asks the petitioner.

“Just sign it,” she responds.

She then hands a petition to someone off camera and gives explicit instructions: “First name is going to be Carol. Last name, Sanderson. This is the address, right here. City, Avila Beach.”

Avila Beach is a small coastal town in San Luis Obispo County. It is not San Francisco.

Smith wrote in his caption that he watched the group for hours that Monday and had seen them operating four days earlier as well. He said the collectors offered no explanation of what the petitions were for and asked nobody for identification. He described many of the people signing as “down on their luck.”

“Seems kind of suspicious to me,” Smith wrote. “Why not sign your own name and you can hear people doing it actually twice.”

Sacramento television station KCRA was first to report that the California Secretary of State’s office has launched an investigation into possible ballot initiative petition fraud following the video’s spread online. Smith told the station he was subsequently contacted by the Secretary of State’s office.

The petitions are tied to three campaigns. Two are connected to billionaire-funded organizations: Building a Better California and Californians for a More Transparent and Effective Government. Both groups are pushing anti-tax measures designed to block a proposed billionaire’s tax. The third petition supports the Retirement and Personal Savings Protection Act of 2026, a proposed constitutional amendment that would prohibit new taxes on certain assets and financial holdings.

All three campaigns have responded by pointing the finger at an outside signature-gathering firm, a common industry arrangement where campaigns contract with professional firms to collect the signatures needed to qualify initiatives for the ballot.

That arrangement matters here. Sixth and Mission sits in the heart of SoMa, a block where many unhoused residents and people experiencing poverty circulate daily. The area has long been a pressure point for the city, where social services, shelters, and survival economies exist alongside each other. Using that location to collect signatures from people willing to take a few dollars for signing someone else’s name is not a coincidence. It is a calculation.

Signature fraud in California ballot campaigns is not a new problem, but it tends to surface in ways that are difficult to prosecute. Paid signature gathering is legal. Signing another person’s name is not. The line between the two is exactly what investigators will now need to examine.

What makes this case notable is that the fraud, if confirmed, was in service of campaigns funded by some of the wealthiest interests in California politics. The billionaire’s tax that these measures aim to block would affect a very small number of people at the very top of the income scale. The signatures being gathered to fight it were allegedly harvested from people at the economic bottom, for $5 each, without their knowledge of what they were signing.

Smith, a local content creator with no institutional backing, stood on a corner and filmed what he saw. His footage prompted a state investigation. That is the kind of accountability that once required a newsroom.

The Secretary of State’s investigation is ongoing. None of the campaigns have publicly identified which firm they contracted for signature gathering. San Francisco Download will continue to follow this story as investigators work through what the video captured and what happened to the petitions already submitted.