Box Turtle Bulletin
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobby“Now you must raise your children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife…”
News and commentary about the anti-gay lobbyAugust 4th, 2009
Anti-gay activists seeking to block the domestic partnership enhancement bill from being enacted needed to collect 120,577 valid signatures. They submitted 137,689, which provides a cushion of 17,122 for invalid signature or errors.
Thus, as long as fewer than 12.4% of signatures are erroneous, they will have enough signatures to qualify for the ballot. The average error rate is 18%
So far, the signatures are being validated with few errors. (Seattle PI)
As of Monday state election workers had checked 11,502 signatures, and 10,087 have been OK’d with 1,415 rejected, mostly because the person does not show up on the voter rolls.
This reflects an error rate of 12.3% and if this continues the validation check could be so close as to be suspenseful to the end. It might even qualify.
However, only 8% of signatures have been checked and we cannot expect that the signature validity is homogenous. We will know more as the count goes on.
UPDATE: The Washington Secretary of State has provided some additional information which may shed light on why the signatures appear at this time to be so clean. It could all have to do with duplicate signatures.
The total duplicates found on Friday were 7. Yesterday they were 16. Logically, this number should grow significantly as the count proceeds. And here’s why:
On Friday there were 5,646 signatures reviewed. So each new signature inspected was compared to a total database of about 5,000 other signatures instead of the total of 137,000. The odds are that if the party signed twice, the signature being inspected would be the first count of that signature and thus not show up as duplicate.
Yesterday, the database doubled in size. Now the odds are about twice as high – but still pretty low – that they’ve already seen the signature. And, indeed, the duplicate error rate doubled.
As the count goes on, the duplicate rate should continue to increase. Even if the missing, invalid, or non-register signatures stay consistent, the increase in duplicates may well kick this petition out of validity.
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steve
August 4th, 2009
Enough with the haters and “religious” nuts out there. CIVIL RIGHTS NOW!!!
Dan
August 4th, 2009
Tim:
Great post. I have concluded that the WA SoS is hopeless when it comes to getting the calculation of “error rate” and “pad” correct. Even in its report today, it manages to slightly misreport the error rate as 12.31% (when it is in fact 12.30 percent rounded down).
The fact is that, while the first two batches of names have come in dishearteningly clean, and the error rate is running at a record low, they are nevertheless on target to top 120,577 by only a few hundred names. If any of the upcoming batches comes up dirty, they are screwed. The margin is razor thin.
Ultimately, this could come down to a a very small number of signatures. Which raises 2 questions, which would be a good topics for a future post. First, is the issue of signature-gatherer deception. The SoS says that there is no statutory remedy for removing a name from a petition. But I see no reason why a citizen could not seek a court order requiring removal on the grounds of fraudulent inducement. I hope we don’t get there, but if they come out at a few dozen names above the threshold, attention will quickly turn to this issue. Second, is the issue of whether and to what extent the anti-R71 folks are planning to conduct their own review of these names and make challenges to the SoS’s validation of specific signatures. I have heard nothing about this. The anti-R71 folks are running silent. Whether this is a matter of strategy or simple laziness in the great tradition of No on 8, who can say?
Timothy Kincaid
August 4th, 2009
Dan,
See also the Update above. This may not be quite as close as is being reported.
Jacob
August 9th, 2009
Election officials are rigging the numbers so this initiative gets on the ballot.
http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2009/08/03/this-probably-means-war
http://www.advocate.com/news_detail_ektid103892.asp
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