08/02/2026
RIGOP CHAIRMAN ALLYN MEYERS' OPINION PIECE IN TODAY'S PROVIDENCE JOURNAL: IN A DEMOCRACY, THE OATH IS THE WHOLE POINT
Rhode Island asks very little of the people who circulate nomination papers. Collect the signatures of registered voters and swear one sentence under oath: that each person signed in your presence. That is the entire safeguard.
It is the single mechanism our law relies on to confirm that the names on a candidate's papers are real, that the voters actually signed, and that no one filled a page at a kitchen table and called it democracy.
When that oath means nothing, nothing behind it can be trusted. That is not a partisan observation. It is the express holding of the Rhode Island Supreme Court.
In Boucher v. Begin, decided in 1997, the Court confronted a sitting state representative whose sworn affidavit turned out to be false. It ruled that the witnessing requirement in our election law is substantive, not a technicality. It must be met in fact, not merely in spirit. And a false affidavit, the court held, cannot be used to validate signatures that were never signed in the collector's presence. The court went further, explaining that the requirement exists precisely to prevent nomination papers from being "left with a family or at a nursing home for other voters to endorse." The justices understood, nearly 30 years ago, exactly how this safeguard gets abused.
We are watching it get abused now, and not in isolation.
Rhode Island has lived through signature scandals in three consecutive election cycles. Forged names, including names of the dead, appeared on a congressional campaign's papers in 2023, and two campaign workers were sentenced. In 2024, forged signatures surfaced on other filings, and a state grand jury handed up indictments that the public did not learn about until this summer. Two of those defendants remain at large. This year, challenges over how signatures were gathered and attested have again landed before the Board of Elections. The pattern is not subtle, and the public is right to be losing patience.
The fixes are known, and they keep dying at the State House. A bill to extend the compressed elections calendar, which gives candidates and objectors barely a day to act, failed this year without so much as a Senate hearing. A proposal to let voters sign and verify nomination papers through a secure online portal passed the House and stalled in a Senate committee. These are not radical ideas. They are housekeeping, and the General Assembly cannot be bothered to pass them.
So the burden falls where it should not have to fall, on ordinary candidates willing to file an objection and sit through a hearing to defend a rule everyone already agreed to follow. That is not how election integrity is supposed to work. It should not depend on a private citizen's willingness to fight.
A conversation needs to take place about what accountability does and does not mean. A candidate accused of a false affidavit is entitled to every protection the law affords, including the right to remain silent. But silence has consequences in a civil proceeding, and a false oath has consequences for the signatures beneath it. Those are not punishments invented by the other party. They are the logical result of the rules themselves, written into our statutes and confirmed by our highest court.
The Rhode Island Republican Party is asking for three things, none of which should be controversial. Enforce the witnessing oath as the substantive requirement the Supreme Court says it is. Extend the election calendar so that challenges can be brought and addressed fairly, and give the Board of Elections clear, written guidance before the September primary, not after it, so that candidates on every side know the standard in advance.
An oath is a promise made under penalty of law. If we let it become a meaningless signature, we are not protecting access to the ballot. We are hollowing it out. Rhode Islanders of every party deserve better, and the fix is well within reach if our leaders would simply act.
