Thousands of fake signatures flagged in Swiss people’s initiative

Procurement initiative: thousands of false initials Keystone-SDA

More than 3,600 of the signatures submitted for the initiative for the security of medical supplies were invalid. The majority of the problematic signatures, previously validated by the municipalities and cantons, came from Geneva.

The popular initiative succeeded in crossing the 100,000 threshold shortly before Christmas with 108,709 valid signatures out of 112,335 submitted. Of these, 3,626 turned out to be invalid, the Federal Chancellery confirmed on Saturday, following a report in the Tamedia Group’s German-language newspapers.

The majority came from the canton of Geneva, with 3,308 signatures invalidated. The Federal Chancellery points out that, in a check of ten popular initiatives, it had discovered only 35 invalid signatures in the canton of Geneva.

Mass forgery

The large number of invalid signatures in the case of the “Yes to secure medical supplies” initiative raises suspicions of “mass professional forgery”, according to the newspapers Basler Zeitung, Berner Zeitung, Bund and Tages-Anzeiger. A forensic analysis has shown that many of the entries on the Geneva forms were written by the same hand, explains Andreas Faller, a member of the initiative committee, in the newspapers.

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A large proportion of the invalid signatures came from one of the two private companies involved in the signature collection, according to the Tamedia newspapers.

According to the media investigation, the Geneva authorities had already declared an “above-average” proportion of signatures invalid when they checked them. When contacted by new agency Keystone-SDA, the initiative committee said it was working with the authorities to shed light on the incident.

Criminal complaints lodged

The “Yes to security of medical supply” initiative calls for measures to be taken against shortages of important medicines and medical equipment. While the population has a right to the best possible medical care, some 600 medicines are in short supply in Switzerland, according to the committee, which includes doctors, pharmacists and druggists.

The text calls for more reliable and secure supply chains from abroad. The initiators also want to reduce dependence on foreign suppliers by strengthening research, development and production of medical products in Switzerland.

In early September, Tamedia’s newspapers revealed that thousands of signatures collected for popular initiatives had been falsified. According to the Federal Chancellery, which has filed several criminal complaints against unknown persons, some companies collecting signatures for a fee did so without a mandate in order to encourage initiative committees to buy them. Since then, stricter measures have been introduced to check signatures.

Adapted from French by DeepL/ac

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