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A few weeks ago I was offered a job that I would have been a fool to refuse. It seemed almost too good to be true, but the person I was dealing with was one I deeply respected and trusted beyond question. Sadly, I've learned that no one is what they seem and once again I misplaced my trust, allowing myself to get royally screwed over. I cannot stress the importance of having solid written contracts - even if it is between friends. If nothing else, not just to build trust and assure that the other party will follow through on their commitments, but to make sure all parties are communicating clearly and on the same page moving forward. In the case of my business dealings with Christina Tobin and Free & Equal Inc. I ignored this essential business lesson, and am paying a hefty price for it. If you would like a greatly abridged version of this, click this link to skip to the end of the post. The Offer. It was Friday, May 20, 2016 and I was looking for summer work now that the school year had wound down. I texted some friends and one of the people I texted, Christina Tobin, got back to me rather quickly with an interesting proposal: She was offered a contract by the Libertarian Party of Illinois (LPIL) to collect 12,500 signatures to get Gary Johnson and the rest of the Libertarian Party's statewide candidates on the ballot in Illinois. I was perfectly upfront with Christina about my experience in this field: I had never coordinated a petition drive, but I did have skills organizing and managing people, complex operations, and planning logistics, so if that was what she needed I would be able to do the job. This is evidenced in our very first text message exchange. We discussed the details of the job requirements. Christina Tobin told me that she wanted to accept this 12,500 signature contract with the LPIL, but she was so busy running her non-profit, the Free & Equal Elections Foundation, that she would not be able to manage the drive herself. She told me she had several petition circulators on the ground in Illinois already and a network of 25-50 circulators in Illinois who could be "activated" as necessary and that we really only needed 4-5 solid people producing 100 signatures per day to get the job done. There was also the promise of moving into other states to manage petition drives for both the Libertarian and Green parties as she set up additional contracts (she mentioned PA, CT, and AL among others). And to be clear, it was never discussed that my job was going to be to recruit petition circulators. Christina told me that because of her long history in the industry, she had all the contacts to get circulators moving - my job was going to be to manage the people she already had recruited. What we were discussing was something like a partnership. It was even framed like this: Christina brings to the table a solid reputation earned through her work with the Free & Equal Elections Foundation which she would leverage to get contacts with the third parties, and contacts in the petition circulating world which she would leverage for recruitment. I brought to the table the ability to organize all the logistics on the ground, keep perfect records of our progress, and meticulously inspect petition forms for fraud and errors. Christina told me that when she used to circulate petitions in Illinois she would get 150 signatures per day easily, and on her best days up to 300 signatures in one day. So, it didn't sound like it would be much trouble getting 450 signatures per day with the people she already had in place ready to go. As for compensation for doing my job, Christina offered me the following: We would hire petition circulators at a rate of $1.50/signature and I would receive $0.50/signature on top of that. If I had time, I could also go out and gather signatures and be paid at a full $2.00/signature. So, when I did the math I figured that 12,500 signatures at $0.50/signature would be worth $6,250. Add to that any signatures I gather (maybe a couple hundred per week) and we're talking about a nice tidy sum for four weeks of intense work. So, I found a dog sitter for my dog at a rate of $150/week, I packed up a couple suitcases, and I boarded a $63 flight to Chicago from Dallas. I was to begin immediately on Monday. Week 1 - Disaster. One thing I did discuss with Christina was if it was okay for me to hire some of my friends to circulate at $1.50/signature. I knew some people who were primarily working in the gig economy and might be able to use the extra cash. Christina told me that the more people we hired the better because that would just mean we could wrap up this petition drive in Illinois early and either have our contract extended past 12,500 signatures or quickly move on to another state. So, I contacted a few friends and had four people let me know they were interested. However, when I arrived in Chicago that Sunday night, Christina had me meet with a petition circulator on the ground Marty to fill me in on the details of where to send circulators. The key things I learned from that meeting were: Marty was not actually going to circulate petitions himself despite Christina thinking he would. He was happy to pass on advice, however. Stay out of the city of Chicago because the "validity rate" was 40% or less, meaning that only 40% of the people who signed petition forms came back with an address that matched a registered voter. Circulate petitions in front of government buildings such as DMV's, post offices, and libraries. Public transportation hubs were good as well as grocery stores (unless you were asked to leave). So, while Marty's information was helpful, the fact that he was not actually going to circulate was the first of many blows to Christina's recruitment efforts. Furthermore, Christina had not informed me until after I arrived in Chicago that we were not going to be circulating petitions within the city limits of Chicago - which made it almost impossible for any of the friends in Chicago I had recruited to do the work as they either did not own cars, or were not motivated to commute out to far flung suburbs every day. Over the following days, one by one, Christina's "circulators on the ground" started to flake off. I actually met with several of these individuals and provided them with clipboards, pens, and stacks of petition forms. But they all just seemed to disappear, some completely to the point of not even returning phone calls or messages anymore. By the end of the first week, our circulation team consisted of myself and a couple of friends who didn't own cars and whom I was providing transportation for. During this time, I was paying for all of these expenses out of pocket. In total, I spent $49.40 on clipboards, pens, and rubber bands and $153.42 on printing and running off copies of petition forms. Most of those supplies and forms disappeared down the black hole of circulators whom Christina put me in touch with that eventually disappeared. I would eventually go on to rack up a total of $306.21 in fuel expenses by June 11. In that first week, Christina started to show hints of doubting her ability to bring in circulators and started relying on me more heavily to get my friends out working ASAP. However, she still framed this as simply a delay and getting my friends started quickly was merely to produce good numbers to show the Libertarian Party - once she got her contacts up and running we would be churning out well over the amount of signatures per day than we needed and move on to another state quickly. By May 26, she started to entertain the idea of posting ads to Craigslist and hiring complete strangers - something she was reluctant to do considering because she preferred to recruit within her networks. As the days passed and more and more of Christina's contacts started to flake off she started to get into a panic. She mentioned increasing the pay from $1.50 to $1.75 and then eventually $2.00. During this time, she confirmed my $0.50/signature "override" repeatedly telling me my pay would also go up per signature to match the increase in pay per circulator. At one point, she mentioned only increasing my pay by $0.10/signature to match a $0.25/signature pay increase to circulators which, at the time I missed. However, as we discussed my role being almost entirely management and the fact that this would prevent me from gathering signatures myself, she confirmed that she would pay me up to $2.50/signature, a $0.50/signature override on circulators working at $2.00/signature. Christina kept calling me when I was trying to go out circulating and telling me to stop circulating petitions and work on other management functions for her. We went back and forth for several hours about the copy of Craigslist ads, I started to juggle phone calls and emails responding to said ads, and eventually, upon her request, I started to build out these massively sophisticated spreadsheets that kept track of how many signatures each team member was getting per day, where they were getting them, how efficiently people were producing, how much each individual's payout would be, how to reconcile that those daily counts with actual turn-in counts as well as the final count reported back to us from the party, including tracking validity, and additional statistics necessary for internal decision making and sharing with the party. I developed a system of digitizing all our petition forms and sharing them with the party so that they could validate faster and so that we could have permanent records in case of a discrepancy. I was driving around collecting petition forms and physically delivering them to the party members myself. All of this was eating into my ability to personally go out and circulate, but this didn't worry me because I kept telling myself: "I'm earning $0.50 for 12,500 signatures. $6,250 makes all this work worth it." Also during this time, Christina decided she would fly into Chicago...

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