In recent weeks, paid canvassers from out of state have fanned out across Prairie Village asking residents to sign a recall petition against Mayor Eric Mikkelson, sometimes using aggressive tactics and in a few cases, prompting police intervention.
It’s the latest flashpoint in a long-running dispute in the city that began two summers ago with an intense debate over housing and zoning and has morphed into the effort to recall the mayor.
Now, the canvassers themselves — some of them paid to collect as many signatures as they can — appear to be adding to the tension.
This month, Prairie Village Police have responded to multiple calls involving canvassers. In one instance, officers were called to the Hen House grocery store at Corinth Square in response to a complaint that canvassers were trespassing as they approached customers outside. In another, a canvasser was arrested for allegedly stealing items from a resident’s porch at Meadowbrook Park.
Multiple canvassers the Post spoke with said they were working on behalf of Save Prairie Village, the group behind the recall effort. The canvassers passed out door hangers with a link to Save Prairie Village’s website and a list of dates for upcoming petition-signing events.
The petition alleges Mikkelson misused taxpayer money last summer by speaking with a city-hired consultant on how to respond to media inquiries about a raft of previously unsuccessful recall attempts. The consultant says it never billed the city for any of the correspondence in question.
Still, the door hangers passed out by canvassers ask, “Did you know that Eric Mikkelson used the city’s PR firm to draft his personal attacks against last year’s recall efforts?”
“Do you love Prairie Village?” the door hanger reads. “We do too! Now let’s hold our public officials accountable.”
When speaking to the Post, however, the canvassers veered away from talking about Mikkelson, instead focusing on topics related to housing and zoning that aren’t addressed by the recall petition. But those issues have been the source of anger and vitriol in the city for the better part of two years as a group of residents has vehemently fought against changes to local zoning codes.
When contacted by the Post, Save Prairie Village denied any connection with the canvassers, despite the clear links to the group’s messaging.
For his part, Mikkelson refutes the recall petition’s allegations, calling them “toxic, extreme lies and personal destruction tactics [that] have no place in legitimate … civil discourse.”
What are paid canvassers used for?
The use of paid canvassers to collect petition signatures for candidates or ballot initiatives is not uncommon.
Carley Allensworth, public and media relations manager for the nonpartisan elections-tracking website Ballotpedia, told the Post via email that paid circulators are typically used when an initiative or measure needs a “significant number of signatures in a relatively short period of time.”
In the Prairie Village recall case, petitioners need to gather more than 4,000 signatures in 90 days to qualify for a future ballot, according to the requirements of state law.
But in other cases, groups can be seeking hundreds of thousands of signatures.
Across the state line, for instance, the group Missourians for Constitutional Freedom used more than 1,800 volunteers to turn in more than 380,000 signatures in an effort to put an amendment to end the state’s abortion ban on the 2024 ballot. It is unclear if paid canvassers were used for that effort.
A whole industry of groups, what Ballotpedia terms “petition drive management companies,” has sprung up to help with petition efforts, contracting with local sponsors of initiatives to employ people to canvas for signatures.
These canvassers are typically paid by the signature. On its website, Ballotpedia says in 2022, the cost-per-required-signature for petition drives that successfully made it onto ballots around the U.S. ranged from as low as $.40 per signature up to more than $25 per signature.
Nationally, paid signature-gathering efforts have sparked some concerns. For example, five Republican candidates in the 2022 Michigan gubernatorial primary were removed from the ballot after it was discovered they used thousands of fraudulent signatures.
What do we know about the Prairie Village canvassers?
Dozens of people have been enlisted in the drive to collect signatures to recall Prairie Village’s mayor, the majority of them Prairie Village residents.
A list of “sponsors” — the people allowed to circulate a petition and gather signatures — is required to be kept on file with the Johnson County Election Office.
The list, obtained by the Post through an open records request, shows that 43 of the 62 sponsors for the recall petition are Prairie Village residents.
There are two former councilmembers on the list, Brooke Morehead and Jori Nelson, both of whom helped lead Stop Rezoning Prairie Village, the resident group that sprung up two summers ago voicing opposition to potential changes to city zoning codes.
The Post is not sharing the names of private individuals who are on the list, but several other names are those of people who are also associated with the Stop Rezoning PV effort.
Of the petition circulators, 19 individuals are listed with out-of-state addresses, including from as far away as Hawaii, Florida, Nevada, Texas and Wisconsin.
Out-of-state canvassers were added to the list of sponsors on June 27, about a month after the original list of Prairie Village canvassers was submitted to the election office on May 24.
A canvasser encountered by a Post staffer outside of Corinth Library said he was working for a group called Hunsaker Strategies LLC.
Hunsaker Strategies’ website boasts experience with petitions and signature gathering in 13 states, including petitions related to the minimum wage in California and Michigan.
The company’s owner Wade Hunsaker appears to be based in Puerto Rico and did not respond to the Post’s multiple phone calls and email requests for comment for this story.
Eddie Greim, an attorney representing three Prairie Village residents who submitted the current recall petition against Mikkelson, said he is aware that Hunsaker was hired and that the company does similar work around the country gathering signatures for petitions.
Still, when pressed, Greim said he did “not know the details of who hired” the company for canvassing services in Prairie Village.
Canvassers have prompted calls to police
Prairie Village Police in the last few weeks have responded to calls from either residents or businesses that have had issues with canvassers.
Through an open records request, the Post obtained police records related to four incidents over the past month involving canvassers.
On Thursday, July 11, a canvasser from Houston, Texas, allegedly stole four personalized candles from a residence at Meadowbrook Park. That canvasser is now required to appear in municipal court via Zoom in August.
Prairie Village Police were also contacted on July 15 about a suspicious person at Meadowbrook Park who the caller believed “was the porch pirate in the Reserve.”
The Reserve is a gated community of single-family homes at Meadowbrook Park, which aligns with the address from the reported July 11 candle theft.
Prairie Village Police also responded to a soliciting call on July 15. A resident off West 72nd Terrace and Roe Avenue reported that a male who said he was from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, was “soliciting signatures for recall of the mayor” and that the male “gets paid $8 per signature,” according to the police’s record of the call.
Later that same week on Thursday, July 18, Prairie Village police responded to an incident of a canvasser allegedly smoking marijuana in a bathroom at Harmon Park.
The following day on Friday, July 19, at around 2 p.m., Prairie Village Police were called to the Hen House at Corinth Square in response to a trespassing complaint prompted by canvassers.
Rezoning part of canvassers’ messaging
Jo Yun, a Prairie Village resident, told the city council during public comments at the July 15 meeting that a paid canvasser came to her door the previous day, Sunday, July 14.
Yun said the canvasser “had no idea” what the basis for the recall petition was but told her that it had “something to do with rezoning.”
Yun said she tried to explain to the canvasser that the recall petition was not about rezoning but that the canvasser “was just being paid to collect names.”
“I was angry to see that a small group of people was carelessly deceiving their neighbors — my neighbors — for their personal policy agenda,” Yun said.
At Corinth Square shopping center, a Post reporter spoke with two canvassers who said they were college students from Kansas City, Missouri, collecting signatures on behalf of Save Prairie Village.
The two canvassers said they were told not to speak with anyone from the media and were unwilling to share identifying information beyond that. It’s unclear if they were being paid for canvassing.
When asked, the canvassers described the recall petition as an effort on behalf of residents who want to keep Section 8 housing — federally subsidized housing for low-income people — out of Prairie Village and to stop any future rezoning efforts.
Housing policy and rezoning are not mentioned in the recall petition itself, though that has been an ongoing theme of the Stop Rezoning PV group.
“A desperate, divisive attempt”
In a statement to the Post, Mikkelson described the recall as “a desperate, divisive attempt by a small group of extremists to overturn a fair election and personally smear the Mayor because of policy differences.”
Mikkelson, who ran unopposed in 2022 and was reelected with 94% of the vote, said the same group of “extremists” who are behind the latest recall attempt also spearheaded nine other unsuccessful recall attempts against him in the past year.
This is believed to be the first recall petition of a local Johnson County elected official approved by the district attorney’s office in 15 years. District Attorney Steve Howe previously said his office stopped short of reviewing the validity of any evidence petitioners were using against Mikkelson and merely determined whether the petition itself met legal muster.
Mikkelson said the district attorney’s ruling on the recall petition “sets a dangerous precedent” for local government.
Mikkelson also linked the group behind the recall petition to three resident-led petitions last summer circulated by Stop Rezoning PV that aimed to thwart any zoning changes in single-family neighborhoods and remake city government. Those efforts never made it to a ballot.
Save Prairie Village denies connection to canvassers
For its part, the group behind the recall effort has tried to distance itself from the paid canvassers.
When the Post called a number previously listed on the Save Prairie Village Facebook page, the person who answered hung up. But the Post did receive email responses to an inquiry made through the Save Prairie Village website’s “Contact us” form.
The person who responded via email to the Post’s online inquiry did not identify themselves but said that there is “no connection to Save PV hiring door knockers” despite the fact that the door hangers distributed by canvassers include Save Prairie Village’s website.
The person told the Post that a “vast majority of citizen-led petitions” nationwide use both paid canvassers and volunteers to gather signatures.
When asked why canvassers pointed to Save Prairie Village as the entity they are working for and why the canvasser’s fliers include a link to the organization’s website, Save Prairie Village told the Post that “we supply information and links to media coverage surrounding the recall.”
The person emailing the Post also did not directly answer whether Save Prairie Village hired Hunsaker Strategies LLC to gather signatures for the recall petition effort.
When asked about why paid canvassers weren’t hired for the three petitions last summer, Save Prairie Village said it had nothing to do with those petitions.
The person went on to say that asking about last summer’s zoning and governance petitions is “yet another misplaced dot.”
“You’re trying to connect dots that just aren’t there,” the person wrote.
