Box Turtle Bulletin

Washington Anti-Gays are Starting to Pray

Every day the fail rate for Referendum 71 is edging closer to 12.4% at which point the effort will go down in flames. After today’s count, at 57.5% reviewed, the cumulative fail rate is 11.63%.

And anti-gays are starting to worry. And bitch. And pray.

Faith and Freedom Network president Gary Randall sent an email out to supporters to complain about the Secretary of State’s verification procedures.

“SURGE” is the operative word. Speed has replaced accuracy.
As the homosexual lobby has increased their pressure on the Secretary to “hurry up” on processing the signatures, the error rate has risen. We have consistently reported that as the speed of checking has been accelerated, the error rate has risen.

Now anyone familiar with the process of looking for error – in anything – knows that going too fast doesn’t result in more identified false discrepancies but rather in missing those that are overlooked. But Randall isn’t doing his best truth telling this week.

The hurry-up plan was put in place as the homosexual lobby discovered that the faster the checkers checked, the more names were discarded as not valid. They began to put pressure on the Secretary a couple of weeks ago. He and his staff have responded, by setting arbitrary deadlines toward which they could surge, increasing the number of checkers, increasing the number of hours of checking and putting new policies in place which would hurry the process and result in an increase in the error rate.

I suspect that Randall knows that his email list is unaware that every rejected signature is scrutinized by a master-checker resulting in many being reinstated, a process that confused and worried gay bloggers and commenters when the accepted totals went up. And “Blame the liberal Secretary of State” is a better cry than “We failed to get enough signatures.”

Much hangs in the balance today.
This is a call to Prayer and a call to Action.
1. Please pray that Secretary Sam Reed and the public servants he employs, will have the integrity to carry out their duties on the R-71 count in a fair and honest way, as they are duty bound to serve all the citizens of the state.
2. Action. Please call or email the Secretary’s office today. Tell him to, “Slow Down Sam.” Ask him to please allow enough time for all signatures to be checked carefully and correctly. He owes you that. Be respectful, but firm. He and his office will assure you they have done elections for many years and they have great systems in place, etc., etc. and are fair. Assure him you expect nothing less on this issue and you feel you are not getting that at this point.

Needless to say, accusations of bias and carelessness did not sit well with the Secretary’s office. They responded on their blog site:

Sponsors of Referendum 71, the effort to overturn Washington\’s new “everything but marriage” domestic partnership law, are accusing the state Elections Division of rushing the signature-verification process and being biased against their effort. Election officials at the Secretary of State\’s office are pushing back, strongly defending their crew of signature-checkers as conducting the process with great care and diligence, not rushing through – and certainly not showing bias one way or the other about the legislation in question. [empasis in original]

They go on to present a point by point refutation of Randall’s accusations. It’s not difficult to see that they were not at all happy with his email.

Now, I’m not exactly sure what prayer Randall thinks his supporters should pray, but I guess it goes something like this:

Dear God,

I know that this referendum is designed to deny rights to some people that I hold dear for myself. And I know that we employed deceit in collecting signatures. And I also know that our entire purpose for doing this is out of our animus towards your gay children.

But please God, bless our efforts and make the signature inspectors confused so that they will consider as valid those signatures that are not eligible and we can go forward with a campaign of anti-gay lies and demonization.

Amen.