BRAINTREE, Mass. — Outside a Stop & Shop in this South Boston suburb a few months ago, Richard Leeman was stopped by a man with a clipboard who asked him to sign a petition to ban the practice of slaughtering horses for people to eat.
Leeman, a retired insurance executive, planted his signature on the paper.
But Leeman recently discovered that the petition he signed was apparently not to protect horses, but to ban gay marriage in Massachusetts, a measure that Leeman says he would never support.
Across the state in Pittsfield, Marie Coe, a homemaker, says the same thing happened to her. So does Christine Bogoian, a vitamin saleswoman in Worcester.
"People were tricked," Bogoian said. "I never meant to sign the marriage petition, and now I'm told that my name was on the marriage petition and not on the horse petition."
All over Massachusetts, organizers of the horse campaign say, hundreds of people were duped into signing the marriage petition when they thought they were endorsing a horse-slaughter ban. They say bait-and-switch tactics left the horse initiative 2,574 signatures short of the 57,100 it needed to be placed on the ballot in November.
Organizers say the culprit was the company hired to collect signatures by the backers of the marriage initiative and, separately, by the Save Our Horses campaign. Save Our Horses says the firm, Ballot Access Co. of Phoenix, was getting paid more per signature for the marriage initiative. They say it used the horse petition to lure people to unwittingly sign the marriage petition, which signature collectors affixed to the same clipboard, under a cover sheet of a horse decorated like an American flag.
The horse proponents have sued to get their measure on the ballot after all.
Backers of the marriage amendment, which got 76,607 signatures — more than enough to advance toward its goal of getting on the ballot in 2004 — deny the accusations. Ballot Access Co. officials did not return phone calls, but James Lafferty, a spokesman for the amendment's sponsors, Massachusetts Citizens for Marriage, said the company had denied the accusations.
After the petition drives started in Massachusetts last September, people complained to the secretary of state's office about switched petitions.
"We found that there were some irregularities and that people may have signed a petition they didn't want to sign," said Ann Donlan, a spokeswoman for the attorney general's office.