For weeks, a coalition of City Council members, labor leaders, community organizers and Mayor Brandon Scott have warned that a measure to shrink the Baltimore City Council will take away vital representation from Black residents and poor neighborhoods.

Well, it turns out those residents are largely the reason the measure, known as Question H, is on the ballot this November. People for Elected Accountability and Civic Engagement, the group backing the reduction measure, submitted more than 12,000 signatures to the Baltimore City Board of Elections earlier this year, securing its place on the ballot.

The Baltimore Banner analyzed those signatures and found that more than 75% of the people who signed it live in majority-Black neighborhoods, including many of the city’s poorest and most disinvested.

West Side neighborhood Sandtown-Winchester, where residents signed at a higher rate than in any other neighborhood in the city, produced more signatures than much more populous East Side neighborhoods like Frankford, Belair-Edison and Canton. Of the 12,633 signatures certified by the Baltimore City Board of Elections, less than 2,000 signatures came from majority-white neighborhoods.

Despite Question H’s Republican origins — both Jovani Patterson, PEACE chairman, and controversial Baltimore County media mogul David Smith, its sole funder, are registered members of the Grand Old Party — petition signers were more Democratic than the city as a whole, according to an analysis of city voter rolls. About 80% of signers were Democrats. Patterson, despite being a city resident, is not listed as having signed his own petition.

So were the signers knowingly siding with Republicans in some unprecedented act of bipartisanship?

The Banner interviewed more than 30 signers and many may not have known the true meaning of what they were signing, or even remember signing.

“I don’t remember signing that,” Lisa Batts said in a phone call. “I thought it was something else. I can’t exactly remember what she [a canvasser] said it was for but I remember signing something at the Edmondson shopping center.”

Toja Griner can’t remember signing it either. Larry McClain says people come by his house all the time. Maybe he signed something, but shrinking council doesn’t seem like something he’d be for — “I don’t want to shrink nothing, I just want to make Baltimore better.” Larry Ross didn’t have a view on council. It’s possible he signed it and just forgot, he said.

Dozens of others are in the same boat. Take Vaughn Volkman. He doesn’t even know who his City Council person is, he said. So if he signed a petition, well that’d be kind of unusual given how he feels about the government.

“It really depends man, I really don’t trust politicians at all, like none of them,” Volkman said.

John Bullock, the councilman whose West Baltimore district had the second-most signatures, said he isn’t surprised people don’t remember signing the petition. He was approached to sign it by a paid canvasser who didn’t really seem to understand exactly what he was asking people to sign, he said.

“They were gathering signatures but I don’t think they were providing a lot of information,” Bullock said. “They were going to large gatherings that were loud, noisy and busy. This wasn’t people going out of their way to sign a petition — it was more so the canvassers attending some of these neighborhood events and capturing people that were already busy.”

PEACE used paid canvassers to collect the signatures, according to a person familiar with the operation but who could not speak publicly about it. Campaign finance reports show PEACE spent nearly $300,000 of Smith’s money with the Towson public relations firm Nevins & Associates. But that firm, according to the source, was only a pass-through for the money, which went to the Fells Group, a political strategy firm. A spokesperson for Nevins & Associates declined to comment; Fells Group did not return a request for comment.

Paid canvassing is not unusual — Fells Group also worked for Renew Baltimore’s signature campaign and is working for the pro-Harborplace redevelopment ballot committee — and it doesn’t mean everyone who signed it are ambivalent about the petition. Some people do have big feelings about City Council.

Take East Baltimore resident Oletha Carter, for example. Carter signed the petition because she feels like the council has no interest in actually serving constituents. Her councilman is Robert Stokes, who Carter says she’s called and called with no response. Stokes lost reelection and will leave office in December.

“Shrink it. Shrink it to the bare bones,” she said. “I believe if there were less they would do more.”

Mount Vernon resident Keith Spivey is of a similar mind. He said too many elected officials can make it easier for people to engage in corruption, and fewer politicians could streamline progress.

“Too many cooks spoil the stew,” Spivey said. “Sometimes less might be better.”

There are some people who signed the petition whose views don’t matter … because they don’t live in Baltimore.

One such signee is Woodlawn resident Anthony Jackson. Jackson, who hasn’t lived in Baltimore in decades, isn’t sure how his name is listed as a signer. In fact, he’s adamant he didn’t sign any petition. But if he had been eligible to sign a city petition, he wouldn’t have picked this one.

“I would have wanted more representation, not less,” he said.

The Banner identified 296 people who signed it and do not live in Baltimore. Elections Deputy Director Abigail Goldman acknowledged that these signatures, which would not have been enough to keep PEACE off the ballot, should not have been certified.

Almost as many nonresidents signed the petition as residents of Councilman Zeke Cohen’s District 1, which encompasses Southeast Baltimore. After being told how few residents of his district signed — District 1 had the fewest signers of any council district — Cohen said his office’s commitment to constituent services likely played a role.

As to the vast number of signatures coming from other, poorer districts, the presumptive council president-elect said he can understand those folks’ frustrations with the city — he just thinks Question H is the wrong way to address them.

“By reducing representation we will also reduce access to critical services and the ability of the council to produce meaningful legislation or hold agencies accountable,” Cohen said.

The general election is Nov. 5. The lone other Smith-backed ballot question to go before voters was a 2022 proposal to impose a two-term limit on city officials. It passed with more than 70% of the vote.

Banner reporters Adam Willis and Emily Opilo and intern Saul Pink contributed to this article.