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.

Hope for Referendum 71’s Failure in Washington

Today the signature verification process crossed the half way point; now 53% of signatures have been inspected. With 72,976 reviewed, and 8,229 permanently rejected, the fail rate for the referendum now stands at 11.28%. *

Of the 64,713 remaining signatures, if less than 55,844 are valid – or a fail-rate of the remaining signatures of 13.74%, then the legislature’s domestic partnership enhancements become law without requiring a vote of the electorate.

And now the good news: today’s posted results were on 7,445 signatures and included 1,028 permanent rejections, a rate of 13.81%. If the remaining signatures do no better than today, the petition will fail. And while there is a chance that today is an anomoly, this is still a hopeful sign.

* my fail-rate differs from that of the Secretary of State because they include as “falure” those signatures that are waiting for a clean copy from the county and which will likely be reclassified as “accepted” when received.

Washington Fail-Rate Up Slightly

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.

Washington Count Reaches 50,493

Currently:

50,496 signatures reviewed (36.7%)
5,375 permanantly rejected
10.65% fail rate

Washington Signatures “Too Close to Call”

After the confusion on validating signatures, many watching (myself included) were discouraged that the fail rate had dropped significantly below that needed to avoid a ballot referendum. But as more signatures are reviewed, that rate is slooooowly starting to increase. And it is reasonable to expect it to continue to rise.

From the Washington Secretary of State blog:

The error rate is expected to rise as the count continues, largely because the number of duplicate signatures will rise as the number of checked signatures rises. In order to qualify for the November ballot, sponsors of R-71 would have to stay below an error rate of 12.4 percent by the time the last signature is checked. State Elections Director Nick Handy said it remains “too close to call” whether R-71 will make the ballot, and cautioned against making assumptions based on the current error rate.

Currently 48,299 (35%) of signatures have been checked. Of those, 5,121 have been permanently invalidated for a cumulative fail rate of 10.60%. This is up from 10.39% fail rate at 25% completed.

But we have no way of knowing whether the signatures reviewed to date are representative of the selection as a whole.

they were bound in volumes of 15 petitions, with no particular order, either geographically or date in which they were gathered initially. Each bound volume was assigned a number and are being assigned to checkers in no particular order– luck of the draw.

Referendum 71 Supporters Seek to Keep Donors Private

The organization seeking to stop the implementation of Washington State’s legislative enhancement of domestic partnership is seeking to do so outside the glare of public scrutiny. They successfully delayed the release of the names of signatories to the petition until a hearing in September, but that isn’t enough.

Now they are seeking to keep its donors private. (Seattle PI)

Protect Marriage Washington last week asked the PDC to hold an emergency hearing because it said there had been violent threats against churches, property and supporters of the campaign. The group said such threats had been forwarded to the FBI.

I’ve not seen these, and they may be real. But in the past, such “threats” have generally turned out to not actually be violent threats at all once reviewed but rather a “threat” of a boycott or simply hate mail of the “I hope you die and rot in hell” variety.

And the request for anonymity does not sound promising at the moment.

Doug Ellis, assistant PDC director, said the agency would not hold an emergency hearing but rather listen to R-71 backers at its next regular meeting, which is Aug. 27. Ellis said transparency is expected in election financing.

“It’s a hurdle that they are going to have to jump to be able to say that the public doesn’t have a right to know who is financing their campaigns,” Ellis said Tuesday

Washington’s New Reporting

The Washington Secretary of State has a new reporting method by which they will wait until supervisors have reviewed and corrected the rejections made by checkers of signatures before they post the results. Based on the finalized review so far, 33,214 have been checked and 3,450 rejected for a fail rate of 10.39%.

Unless the remaining three quarters of signatures are very different from the first quarter, this referendum will qualify for the ballot. And it may set a new record for cleanest petition ever submitted in the state.

At present there is no way to determine if the signatures are being reviewed in any particular order. If they are in collection order, then there is a possibility that they will be less clean as time goes on.

Confusion in Washington – Anti-Gay Petition May be Valid

We were tracking and reporting on the Washington Secretary of State’s efforts to verify signatures presented for Referendum 71, a response to the legislature’s extension of benefits to domestic partners. And we were reporting that the petitions did not appear to have an adequate validation rate to make it to the ballot.

But we were under the mistaken assumption that the Washington Secretary of State was reporting the final determination of each signature. It turns out that they were reporting tentative rejections and not those who had been validated at the supervisor level. And the supervisors have reinstated enough signatures to significantly reduce the rejection rate.

As of the Friday day shift, the state has reviewed 35,296 signatures and rejected 4,063, a rejection rate of 11.51%. If correct, this would be a rejection rate low enough to allow the referendum to reach the ballot. If what I have read is correct, it would also set a record for the cleanest petition ever.

However, I’m not puting too much faith in this calculation. Currently the state is reporting a total number of signatures checked that is lower than the sum of those checked on a daily basis. This suggests to me that the reporting process is ruled by confusion.

Mid Friday Washington Count Update

As we go into our weekend, it will be on a positive note. The verification of signatures collected to stop the legislature’s enhancement of domestic partnerships is not going well for Washington’s anti-gays. As of 10 pm last night, the signatures were yielding a 13.25% fail rate.

I am going to be reporting the numbers slightly differently than most. This is due to the way in which I will be considering those which are currently considered invalid due to a missing signature in the state’s database. Currently 89 signatures have been rejected for that purpose. However, the state will consult with counties regarding these signatures and, according to the Secretary of State’s website, most of these will be considered valid when the signature is recovered from the county. We already know that they are not duplicate on un-registered; the only way they could remain invalid is if the signature does not match the one on the voter registration card once the state recovers that comparison signature.

After yesterday’s swing-shift, the fail rate for the day was 14.11%. The state now has inspected 21.7% of the signatures submitted with a cumulative fail rate of 13.41%. To be a successful petition, the remaining signatures would have to have a fail rate lower than 12.21%.

UPDATE:

There appears to be confusion over the invalidated signatures. It appears that some of them (perhaps 409) were later determined to be valid by supervisors.

Unfortunately this is not at all clear. And unless un-registered voters were later found to be registered, then this seems to be mathematically impossible.

If this new declaration is correct, then the fail rate is currently at about 11.64% and this is not at all good news for those who are in domestic partnerships in Washington.

Sad Day for Washington Anti-Gays

The Washington Secretary of State is now using two shifts to validate signatures for Referendum 71, the petition drive to halt the expansion of domestic partnership rights and place them on the ballot.

The Washington Secretary of State has compiled the results for the first shift for today (ending at 3:00 pm). Of the 3,831 signatures reviewed, 573 were rejected, a rate of 14.96%. This brings the total rejection rate up to 13.54%. Unless there is a drastic change in results, this petition is on its way to failure.

Washington Count – Day Four

The Washinton Secretary of State has now counted 17% of the signatures submitted to block the legislature’s enhancement of domestic partnership rights.

Yesterday, an additional 6,140 signatures were reviewed with 14.2% rejected.

As it stands, of the 23,457 signatures reviewed, 20,335 were verified and 3,122 invalidated, a 13.31% fail rate. The remaining signatures will only result in a valid petition should they have a fail rate of 12.26% or lower.

After Third Day of Counting, Washington Signature Fail Rate is 13%

Todays validation of signatures submitted to halt a bill that enhanced domestic partnerships proved to be bad news for anti-gays. Today there was a fail rate of 14.4%, bringing the average fail rate over three days to 13.0%. Although it is difficult to establish a trend over just three days, this does seem to validate the assumptions that as time goes on more errors will be revealed – especially duplicate signatures.

The petition will be valid if it keeps its cumulative error rate below 12.4%.

Washington Signature Validation – Close

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.

Washington Anti-Gay Petition – 137,689 Signatures

The Washington Secretary of State has announced the total number of signatures turned in by the anti-gay coalition seeking to block the domestic partnership enhancements enacted by the legislature. With 137,689 signatures submitted, anti-gays only have a 14.2% cushion for error over the 120,577 valid signatures needed. The average historical error rate in Washington State is about 18%. **

WhoSigned.org, along with a couple of other petitioners, has requested that the state provide them with a listing of the names so that they can make it public. Supporters of Referendum 71 claim that signatories should be exempt from laws that require public disclosure of signatories and are suing to keep the names on the list private.

“We have a one-size-fits-all shoe that is going to result in the inappropriate disclosure of petition signers, who will then be exposed to boycotts, threats, harassment and so forth,” Pidgeon said.

Attorney Stephen Pidgeon seems to be unaware of the meaning and purpose for petitions. He seems to think that “stand up and be counted” should not allow for any public consequences for such an action.

A judge has put a temporary restraining order on the state until a hearing is held on Wednesday. Considering that other states have found the listing of anti-gay petitioners to be legal and that the State will be siding with those who wish full disclosure, I think it unlikely that anti-gay advocates will be able to convince the court that they should have special rights.

Meanwhile, the state will move forward with reviewing signatures one by one to determine their validity. They will likely fall about 7,500 short.

Ultimately, Gary Randall and the other organizers have not well served those they claim to represent. The most likely scenario is that there are inadequate signatures for a referendum but those who did sign will be exposed to public scrutiny.

The end result is that some friendships will be ended, some customers lost, some families shattered, and some respect will be lost. Further, the campaign may well be embarassed by a large number of signatories who publicly denounce the campaign and explain that they were fooled and defrauded.

And all for nothing.

** Reader Dan notes below that the proper numbers to compare are not the cushion of 14.2% and the historical error rate of 18%. Rather, we should note the error rate which this petition could have which would allow it to still have sufficient valid signatures. And that is 12.4% of the total signatures submitted.

Comparing this maximum error rate of 12.4% to the historical rate of 18% further solidifies my expectation that this petition will fail to qualify for the ballot.

Washington Anti-Gays Turn in Petitions with Tiny Cushion

On Sunday, anti-gay activists in Washington turned in signatures to place on the ballot a referrendum on whether a law granting same-sex couples domestic partnerships all the rights, responsibilities, and obligations as marraige (but not the name). Accoding to organizer Gary Randall of the Faith and Freedom Network,

We delivered a little over 138,000 signatures on 9,359 petition sheets to the Secretary of State’s office in Olympia a few hours ago.

Because the petition will require 120,577 valid signatures, they have a cushion of less than 15% to allow for errors, duplicates, unregistered signatories, incorrect addresses and other invalid signatures. This is a very small margin. Although many say this is too close to call, I think it is likely that when verification is complet that this effort will prove to have been in vain.

However, even though the signatures may not be adequate, there will be those who suffer from Saturday’s effort.

First there are those 5,700 couples who have to wait for their rights – which were to have been recognized on Sunday. They have waited long enough, and I suspect that much of the decision to go ahead and turn in the petitions was based on spiteful desire to harm these couples for as long as they could.

And there are 138,000 people who will now have recorded for posterity and for public scrutiny on a searchable website their action to deny rights to their neighbors. Sadly, some of them were gay supporters who were deceived and lied to – but they too will be tarred as unkind, selfish, spiteful neighbors.