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 17th, 2009
With almost half of the signatures reviewed, the fail-rate of the petition is about 11%.
65,531 inspected (47.6%)
7,201 permanently rejected
10.99% fail-rate*
However, the cumulative fail rate by the end of the process must be above 12.4% or the domestic partner enhancements will be subject to the whim of the voters.
One area where there is hope is in the category of those rejected because they are duplicates. This rate is increasing daily. For example, the percentage of signatures found to be duplicate on the third day of inspection was 0.37%, those rejected last Wednesday were 0.74% of votes inspected, and those posted today as duplicates were 1.66%. This is expected to continue to increase.
* my fail-rate differs from that reported by the WA Secretary of State due to my excluding temporary rejections.
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Cole
August 18th, 2009
Election officials are RIGGING the election.
Don’t be surprised tommorrow when the percent of rejected signatures goes down. According to their math they looked at 7,225 more signatures today yet the percent of rejected signatures has remained the same, 11.03%. Doesn’t make sense. The election officials want the rejected signature percent well below the 12.43% so that it looks like the election wasn’t rigged.
8/17/09 – 58,306 signatures counted – 11.03% rejected
8/18/09 – 65,531 signatures counted – 11.03% rejected
I urge everyone to copy the secretary of state’s page since they continuously take down the old fixed numbers and put up new fixed numbers. How to copy web pages:
1. Press the Windows and Print Screen/SysRq buttons together.
2. Open windows paint or adobe photoshop or a similar program.
3. Press paste.
4. Save.
Timothy Kincaid
August 18th, 2009
Cole,
There are monitors from both camps reviewing every accepted or rejected signature. Unless you are willing to believe that those gay supporters who oppose this referendum are really super agent secret spies in on a grand conspiracy, then the election officials are not rigging the vote count.
Cole
August 18th, 2009
I’m not saying there is a conspiracy. Heterosexuals have a millenia long hisotry of oppressing gay people. The heterosexual “checkers” aka fixers will look at these signatures with prejudice. Heterosexuals believe it’s their job to vote on gay people’s rights. Why do you think the rejected signatures in the first 33,000+ batch got at least four looks while the accepted ones did not? You have to remember that on day five this referendum was NOT going to make it on the ballot then suddenly master fixers came in and “readjusted” the numbers by more than 19% thereby putting this referendum back in play. Gay people raised concerns about the process and guess what the election officials did? Looked at the same rejected signatures again. And you know what the rejected signature percent went down another 10%. Here we have the same rejected signatures looked at at least FOUR times with FOUR massively different numbers. The process is RIGGED to get this anti-gay referendum on the ballot so haterosexuals (just like those counting these signatures) can take away gay people’s rights.
The secretary of state spokesperson, David Ammons gave a flip and disrespectful answer as to why the rejected signatures have gotten so many looks while the accepted signatures have not. He said basically gay people ain’t worth looking at the accepted again because of tax payer expense.
David C.
August 18th, 2009
Cole, I think it is more reasonable to think that the process has been designed to favor placing initiatives on the ballot, not just this initiative, and appears designed to increase the probability that a signature will be accepted if possible. The most basic tests for duplication and validity of registration are applied to every signature, and after that the signature itself is checked, possibly multiple times.
Look at it from another perspective. Suppose that a group of gay activists were trying to prevent from being made law legislation they felt to be discriminatory. Wouldn’t you want every signature to be given the benefit of the doubt? Doing so translates to ensuring multiple looks at the one thing that is somewhat subjective: the signature, and if one is suspect, it is most likely rejected until someone with enough experience can verify the rejection or reverse it. This is not being done in secret: representatives of both interest groups are there observing the process.
In a petition drive, there are no “negative votes”, that is, people don’t check a box that says they do not want a referendum: there exists only a critical threshold for the number of valid signatures that must be reached to cause a measure to be placed in front of the voters.
The real deal, if it happens, is the vote, and the numbers so far say that it might not. The history of petition drives like this in Washington state says it might or might not, but the process of counting the signatures is being conducted in as transparent and precise a way as anybody might reasonably expect. Most states would use statistical sampling, but not in this case: every signature is being verified as belonging to a registered voter.
Had a judge not interfered with the process, all signatures would have been made public. The missing transparency is due solely to that. There is no conspiracy, except perhaps by those that would see their hands hidden behind the curtain, and even that attempt to hide is likely to ultimately fail, and was certainly not a policy of the state.
You may argue that a bias favors placing an initiative before voters. I think that is true. But once again, it is the vote that matters. Instead of wringing our hands over the petitions, we must all prepare ourselves to support our gay brothers and sisters in Washington state as they work to get R-71 approved if it comes to a vote of the people.
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