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This April, I made the decision to run for Boston City Council At-Large to be one of the four city councilors who are supposed to represent the whole of Boston. The campaign was essentially junk data - I had no campaign team, no money, no political allies, only the clothes on my back and a gleam in my eye.

I had a variety of justifications. I wanted to prove to my friends how easy it is to get involved in local politics, and choosing the city council at-large election was a lofty but not ridiculous goal. I wanted to see for myself what city councilors go through on the way to winning office. I wanted to see how many people would take my campaign seriously (it turns out, quite a few). But what I got most of all was a full appreciation of the rotting corpse of American democracy.

I quickly discovered the first barrier of entry to any political campaign in Boston: the signature requirement. Every candidate for City Councilor At-Large in Boston is required to collect 1,500 signatures - over the course of just three weeks - to even get on the ballot. This requirement is complicated by the fact that signers can only sign four nomination petition forms (fancy word for signature forms), and the first four turned in would be the ones that would count. So if I got someone to sign who had already signed four other city councilor at-large candidates’ forms, that signature would not be counted.

Every candidate can receive their nomination petition forms starting on the 21st Tuesday before the election and must return them by the 18th Tuesday (this is the way the Boston City Charter puts it, don’t blame me). So on the 21st Tuesday, all the candidates line up outside the city Elections Department and file ten at a time into a meeting room where the legal requirements of signature collection are explained to them in great detail - even though most of them have already heard it before. So it was there I found myself on a Tuesday morning.

Later that day, I employed my initial strategy of signature collection - simply walk around and ask people if they’ll sign my form. This is the most naive perception of what signature collection ought to be, right? A candidate hitting the streets, engaging with the public on the issues, showing they can stand up for their views around strangers. There’s only one problem with this strategy. By the end of three hours making my way around Downtown and the North End, I had collected only 30 usable signatures.

There were plenty of people who just didn’t live in Boston - which, of course. There were an even greater number who wouldn’t engage with me at all - which is understandable for someone who has somewhere to be, or just wants to get on with their day in peace. There were a few to whom I explained my perspective - our political system is broken, both parties are complicit, we need bolder solutions in our local government - but many didn’t want to give that story a chance. Many just wanted to know if I was a Democrat or a Republican and when I told them neither, lost interest.

Many signed but illegibly or incompletely. One very kind - and likely inebriated - young man signed, then asked whether I was “cool with the gays,” and crossed out his signature when I iterated that I was, indeed, “cool.” His friend and him walked off laughing, no doubt very proud.

And a select few actually lived in the city, wanted to chat, liked my politics enough, and signed a legible signature.

At a rate of 10 usable signatures per hour, I would need to go out for 150 hours in three weeks. That adds up to 7-8 hours every single day, and walking and talking constantly for 7-8 hours is not easy work. Where is someone supposed to find the time for that? I suppose a candidate could just quit their day job and go all in!

Of course, a real candidate has a campaign team, and more importantly, campaign money. They can pay staff and volunteers to go out and collect signatures for them, which while I guess is an “extension” of the candidate engaging with the public, it definitely doesn’t have the same effect. But even then, that’s a full time job for a campaign staffer or two, and a difficult one at that. There’s got to be a way to make this easier.

Well, it turns out there is! Friends of Kelso for City Council informed me that the prime location for signature collection is not walking the streets, but immediately outside the exit of a supermarket. Everyone that walks out, you beg to sign your form. I traveled down to the Roche Bros in West Roxbury - which I learned was a signature collection mecca - and I was able to collect about 30 signatures per hour. Not bad compared to 10 per hour.

I met a couple of men collecting for Robert “Bob” Cappucci (mayoral candidate) and learned a couple tricks of the trade. For example, you only ask people as they exit - not as they go in since then you might forget and ask them again while they’re coming out. It helps to collect in packs - if someone stops to sign for one candidate, they’re likely to sign for another.

What makes a location ripe for signature collection I think is threefold. One, a location has to have a high percentage of Boston registered voters. Too many residents from Somerville, Cambridge, Brookline, or Newton would bring down your numbers. Too many non-citizens or college students would also drag you down.

Two, a location has to have a high percentage of politically engaged people, who even want to sign a petition. This doesn’t necessarily correlate with education. I also stopped by the Shop and Stop in South Boston, where there were obviously a large number of college-educated young people who had moved to the city for a job. But, they signed far less frequently than residents of West Roxbury. They just weren’t as invested in the city.

Third - where the Stop and Shop shined - you need volume. No people, no signatures. So, supermarkets are a great way to get volume. You can choose your location, frequently Jamaica Plain and West Roxbury, based on where people will be mostly families and older residents. Basically, the best way to get enough signatures is to spend a week relentlessly pestering established residents of Boston. You really want more than 1,500, since illegible signatures can be thrown out by the elections department. Say 2,000 is good, collecting at a rate of 30 an hour. You need to spend 66 hours collecting signatures, which averages to about 3 hours every day for three straight weeks. By yourself? Difficult unless you’re retired or unemployed. With a crew? Potentially doable.

While I was in the middle of this signature collection fiasco, I received a rather enticing couple of phone calls. The men on the phone understood that I might be having a tough time collecting signatures on my own, and offered to collect some for me. For a price.

These are signature collection firms, and chances are you have encountered an employee of theirs on the street. For every ballot question and candidacy, signature collection is required. Ballot questions in particular can run into the tens of thousands of signatures statewide to get on the ballot. It only makes sense that an industry would spring up to fill this obvious need.

But just how necessary is working with these firms to get elected? I called back a firm to get a sense of the constraints. The first thing I learned was the price tag - $9 a signature. So if you used a signature collection firm to get you, say, 1,500 signatures (and remember you should get many more than that to be safe), it would run you $13,500. Now you don’t need to use the firm to collect all your signatures, but the costs could easily run into the thousands.

But I wanted more, so I asked outright what they thought the likelihood would be of someone getting on the ballot without using a signature collection firm. They said if you had a large team with name recognition, like Michelle Wu or Josh Kraft, it would be possible. But for most candidates it’s not. Of course, this is all hearsay. I doubt many city council candidates would be quick to put “signature collection” on their campaign expenditures. They may be hidden under “consulting” or a similar tag. But I have no reason not to believe that many candidates, especially for city council at-large, are using these services.

… is the question any reader who cares about democracy is likely asking right now. Data analyst that I am, I wanted to look and see if I can find some precedent for it. It turns out that high ballot access requirements of thousands of voters’ signatures are common across the country. They were largely instituted during the Red Scare in the 1940s and 1950s to prevent communist and socialist parties from appearing on the ballot. Throughout the ‘60s and ‘70s, many were overturned in court as unconstitutional violations of the First and Fourteenth Amendments. But because of the piecemeal nature of these challenges and the obvious disincentives of Democrats or Republicans to fix the problem with legislation, many have lasted to this very day.

But other cities across the globe have signature requirements too. How do they match up with Boston’s? Below are the numbers for Boston compared with the numbers for the similarly-sized Dublin, Edinburgh, and Winnipeg.

There are certainly some differences to acknowledge between these systems. Boston has four at-large city councilors and nine district councilors, a feature of none of the other cities have. Dublin and Edinburgh have multi-member districts, which neither Boston nor Winnipeg has. But roughly, these numbers capture the situation in Boston (and the US in general) versus other nations.

The fact is that Boston’s requirement is hilariously out of step with these other nations. How does Boston match up to similarly sized US cities?

For Las Vegas, which only takes a $100 filing fee in lieu of signatures, I have cheekily converted it at the rate of $9 per signature to require roughly 11 signatures. Detroit’s requirement is based on the number of voters in the previous election, and requires you to collect more than .25% of the number of voters in the previous election divided by 9. It appears that for the purposes of explaining this to candidates, they simplify it to 500 to 1000 signatures. But I wasn’t satisfied with this, so I did the math based on the 2021 election results to arrive at a minimum requirement of 53 signatures. Louisville Metro Council also requires a filing fee of $50, so roughly 6 signatures.

But forget comparing with other cities - what about comparing Boston with itself? Boston’s signature requirement was first implemented in 1909 as 5,000 - along with a host of other city charter “reforms” designed by the Republican-controlled legislature to dampen the power of Democratic Irish Americans in the city. When the charter was reformed again in 1951, it was lowered to 1,500. In 1983, the requirement remained the same but the nine at-large councilors were reduced to four, and nine district councilors were added. In 1993, the requirement was lowered to 500 signatures. This was authored by former state senator Robert Travaglini, whose brother ran (unsuccessfully) for at-large city council that same year. So, was the signature requirement an attempt to get his brother on the city council, or to defend his brother’s hurt honor? Maybe, but Robert was on the city council right before 1993, so it may be that he observed the same discrepancy I did.

It took a little while, but I did chase down the act of the state legislature which raised the signature requirement again, authored by current state senator Mike Rush. Here’s how the calculation has evolved over the years:

That 1909 requirement is far and away the most restrictive I’ve ever seen, even looking at state-wide offices. It’s equivalent to collecting 6.7% of the population’s worth of signatures, a task which I’m sure was astronomical in 1909 and with the virtualization of all communication would be many times as difficult today.

Cutting to the chase: the signature requirement in Boston has been weaponized to protect incumbents and tip the scale in favor of money and name recognition over ideas. Someone with an already built campaign team is the only type of candidate likely to be able to clear this requirement. The signature requirement thus serves as a barrier to entry for grassroots, homegrown would-be councilors to take greater control of their city.

That’s all without mentioning the massive stacks of physical signature sheets and the time savings by removing the signature requirement.

Before I realized that this issue can only be resolved with an act of the state legislature, I sent an email to the at-large city councilors highlighting the problem. I did get a single response from Erin Murphy extolling the virtue of collecting signatures on the street to meet the real people of Boston. Remember that myth from twenty-five paragraphs back?

There is some hope, however. In Somerville, they just got a new city charter, where at-large city councilor candidates will have to collect 100 signatures instead of the current 150. This will immediately reduce the signature requirement per constituent from 1.82 to 1.22. Boston ought to petition the state for a much larger reduction. 1 signature per 1000 constituents is the gold standard across most other cities, meaning each city council at-large candidate must collect 168 signatures to get on the ballot.

Current campaign strategy: collect a ton of contributions from outside Boston or even MA, and use them to pay people to collect signatures for you.

Campaign strategy after this change is implemented: gather signatures with yourself and a small team of volunteers to hear directly from constituents in Boston.

Well, you’re antsy aren’t you. Don’t have a long commute to read or anything like that? Alright.

Ballot access requirements are restrictions placed on a candidate to be able to get on the ballot - after all, we can’t just have anyone running for office, can we? Signature requirements are a common method of accomplishing this, but many candidates simply hire signature collection firms to stand outside supermarkets imploring hapless shoppers for signatures - using their deep campaign pockets to circumvent the process as intended. This is exacerbated by the fact that Boston’s signature requirement - 1,500 to be exact - for city councilor at-large is ten times the requirement for local offices in other major democratic countries and around the US.

I don’t blame city councilors for doing what our political system incentivizes them to do - I only want them to work towards reform. My recommendation is that the signature requirement is decreased tenfold to ~150 (with similar decreases for other offices, like mayor), which will incentivize candidates to actually go out themselves and collect signatures. This number isn’t meant as a be-all, end-all, but a significant reduction in the signature requirement is certainly warranted under the circumstances.

If you look at national politics and think, “Why are we still operating under this ancient political system?” then you should also question our state and local politics, which in large part are set up to mirror the national level. Reforming signature requirements is just one avenue of many we should be tackling to bring our political institutions in line with the realities of the 21st century. Otherwise, at all levels of government, we will find ourselves drowning in corruption, loopholes, and political games.