Backers of a stalled initiative to use Portland’s clean energy funds to hire police officers filed a lawsuit on Thursday accusing local elections officials of discrimination and calling for an independent signature recount.

Safer Portland, the group leading the effort, filed the lawsuit in the U.S. District Court of Oregon. They are represented by the law firm Holtzman Vogel and attorney Anil Karia, who also represents the initiative’s largest donor: the Portland Police Bureau’s rank-and-file union.

“Without immediate action from this court, the initiative will not be on the ballot this election and voters will be irreparably deprived of their constitutional rights,” Safer Portland wrote in its 30-page complaint.

The group accuses elections staffers of tossing out numerous sheets of signatures required to qualify a petition for the November ballot. It argued the city’s process violated signatories’ voting rights and treated them in an “arbitrary and disparate manner.”

The group said it is seeking a timely recount to get on the ballot. It said it proffered about 63,000 signatures but accused staffers of disqualifying thousands of them over things like mismatched signatures and bad dates.

“The process was riddled with errors and inconsistencies, including similar signatures treated differently, questionable date-based rejections, renumbering of petition sheets that were difficult to trace and an unreliable audit trail,” wrote Jody Maier, a spokesperson with Holtzman Vogel, a law firm assisting Safer Portland.

The city’s elections office has rejected this claim.

“Our office has provided substantial information about why this petition did not qualify to Portland’s ballot,” wrote Portland Elections Manager Deborah Scroggin in an email to OPB. “We look forward to informing the court and have no further comment on this pending litigation.”

The city previously told OPB that signatures were rejected because petitioners struck them out before submission, signature lines were left blank, or signatures appeared altered without verification required under state law. Multnomah County elections officials also reviewed the signatures and disqualified some for being duplicative or coming from people not registered to vote in Portland.

Portland City Elections on Aug. 4 announced the initiative fell short by 6,300 signatures to qualify for the November ballot. Staffers rejected more than 8,000 signatures in all, they said.

Officials from both the city and county elections departments are named in Safer Portland’s lawsuit.

“Multnomah County Elections is committed to transparency and maintaining our rigorous review and quality control procedures,” said county spokesperson Denis Theriault.

The lawsuit names Oregon Secretary of State Tobias Read while also relying on his past statements in its argument. After Safer Portland first raised concerns about the petition’s rejection, Read noted that the concerns “reflect poorly on our state’s entire election system.” The group accuses Read of not taking action on the concerns raised as the state’s top elections official.

A spokesperson for Read declined to comment on pending litigation. Safer Portland also noted in its lawsuit that it wants the recount to be conducted by Reed or a court-appointed expert.

Still, much of the complaint is centered on the initial signature-verification process. The backers accuse staff of inconsistently grading signatures and dates. For example, they included images of handwritten dates that they said were legible yet staff deemed “partial or ambiguous.”

The group also added images of multiple signatures from a single gatherer that were “very similar” yet faced “disparate treatment.” Some were labeled accepted and others labeled rejected.

“These inconsistencies demonstrate that the city defendants applied an arbitrary standard — it accepted declaration signatures from the same circulators on some sheets while rejecting materially similar signatures on others,” attorneys for Safer Portland wrote.

Attorneys at Holzman Vogel did not immediately respond to requests for comment. The law firm was not, until now, a known part of the campaign. It is a national firm with offices from Miami to New York City to Phoenix.

Safer Portland’s initiative proposed using 25% of the Portland Clean Energy Fund annual revenue, or about $50 million a year, to hire 400 more police officers.

The petition has been solely funded by the Community Safety Coalition PAC, a group run by leaders of Safer Portland that relied on hefty donations from the Portland Police Association and local business owners, like Columbia Sportswear CEO Tim Boyle and auto magnate Jeff Swickard. The city’s August 4 rejection of the petition did little to slow their fundraising. In the two weeks since, the campaign has collected nearly $11,000.

Jenny Lee, who led an opposition to the Safer Portland petition known as Hands Off PCEF, called the lawsuit a “waste of taxpayer dollars.”

“It works against our democracy by sowing distrust in our election officials,” said Lee. “It’s very clear that Portlanders were ultimately not supportive of this measure; they fell far short of signatures, not even coming close to what they’d need to qualify.”

Lee was also a plaintiff in a December lawsuit that successfully kept an earlier iteration of the Safer Portland initiative from advancing.

She noted that the initiative’s early August rejection by the elections department came after the Secretary of State’s office received nearly 100 complaints from voters who reported feeling misinformed or misled by Safer Portland signature gatherers.

News Source : https://www.opb.org/article/2026/08/20/portland-police-ballot-initiative-backers-sue-local-elections-officials/