In an 8/21/08 story in the Phoenix New Times, Sarah Fenske reports that thousands of voter registration forms may have been tossed in the trash when Mark Jacoby and YPM skipped town.

"...But I think it may be a problem involving lousy subcontractors. Everybody in town seems to have used YPM LLC, a Florida-based company owned by Mark Jacoby. And Jacoby's group is at the center of Jack Bickley's most damning allegations. (Jacoby, who has left town, did not return calls for comment by press time.)

Bickley says that Jacoby encouraged, and even expected, behavior that could well be criminal under Arizona statutes.

Jacoby, he says, had a system where a trainer would be assigned as many as six new circulators. Even though the trainer would be nowhere near the circulators while they collected signatures, he would still sign the back of their petitions, attesting that he'd personally witnessed them.

"The person who signed the back was not present when the petitions were signed," Bickley says. "How could he be? He had five or six people working under him at different spots around town."

Both Jacoby and Jenny Breslin, who owns JSM LLC, served as subcontractors on all the initiatives handled by Petition Partners. (They also contracted on the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative.)

Both Jacoby and Breslin have generated controversy in other states.

In Massachusetts in 2005, a college student told the Associated Press that Jacoby trained her in bait-and-switch techniques, including telling people they were signing for one petition while their signatures were actually captured for two. "The fraud was looked upon as a game," the student said.

A year earlier, the St. Petersburg Times linked Jacoby to a registration scam. The Florida Department of Law Enforcement began investigating, the paper wrote, after receiving allegations that as many as 4,000 voters were registered as Republicans without their consent. Jacoby was never charged.

As for Breslin, her signature-gathering company was subject to a criminal investigation in Ohio after allegations of fraudulent voter registrations, according to the Akron Beacon Journal. (Apparently, the probe was dropped without charges being filed. Breslin could not be reached for comment.) She also came under fire for allegedly turning in forged signatures in Florida, the paper reported..."