People's rights Farmers' association and SP call for rules against signature forgery

The Farmers' Union and the SP are calling for binding rules against signature forgery. For this reason, they are no longer taking part in the round table on the integrity of signature collections, which was convened by the Federal Chancellery.

"We very much regret that there was no willingness on the part of the Federal Chancellery to explore effective and binding measures together with the participants," said Martin Rufer, Director of the Swiss Farmers' Union (SBC), and Tom Cassee, Secretary General of the SP, in a joint letter obtained by the Keystone-SDA news agency. They thus confirmed a report in the "Tages-Anzeiger" newspaper. The farmers' association and the SP were absent from the third meeting of the round table on Wednesday, as the newspaper reported.

The Federal Chancellery set up the round table after it became known in September that commercial companies had allegedly cheated when collecting signatures for popular initiatives. In repeated meetings until spring 2025, the aim is for collecting organizations to commit to a code of conduct.

However, this is not enough for the Farmers' Social Democratic Alliance. It wants a ban on commercial signature collections or at least binding transparency provisions regarding the number of commercially collected signatures for an initiative or referendum. The Federal Council rejects a ban on paid collection, it added. Instead, it has high hopes for the round table.

The authors of the letter are also convinced that the hurdles for submitting a popular initiative are low today, as the Swiss Farmers' Union stated on request. Today there are several times more voters than when the limit of 100,000 was set. It should also be possible to collect the required number of signatures for an issue without buying them.