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 7th, 2009
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.
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JC
August 7th, 2009
WA Sec of State is now reporting an 11.63% cumulative failure rate. Apparently, 409 signatures were moved from various invalid categories to valid categories.
Timothy Kincaid
August 7th, 2009
JC,
I’m a bit uncertain about the explanation. I’ll update once I’m convinced of the math.
Dan
August 7th, 2009
Tim:
I thought I was a smart person until I tried to parse through the latest numbers. Check out the daily breakout reports. How can every day (except day #1) have an error rate above 12%, but the cumulative error rate as of close of business Friday is 11.51%?
At a more general level, it appears that a large number of rejected names are getting added back in by a so-called “master checker”. I sincerely hope someone on the anti-71 side is doing their own due diligence.
In any event, I said yesterday that it was too early to break out the party hats. I still think this will go down once we hit some really dirty batches, but it is entirely possible that it will qualify. Yesterday the anti’s had a deficit, but now thanks to these master checker revisions, we have to make up a deficit of about .9%, with about 100,000 names left.
ragarth
August 7th, 2009
Think we’ve got a master checker practising the fine skill of lying for jesus?
David C.
August 7th, 2009
Maybe what’s happening is that the “final inspections” are starting to catch up, the process pipeline is filling up, and the fail-rate will converge on some number. In a few days I suspect us to see a steady trend in the numbers, one way or the other.
I suspect there is too much scrutiny and dual control in the process to permit any “fudging” of the numbers.
Bruno
August 8th, 2009
I think I’m gonna stop paying attention to this crap. Just come up with the result and get back to me when you can, Washington.
Trevor
August 10th, 2009
Anti-gays: “we don’t have anything personal against ‘homosexuals’ having rights, just changing the definition of marriage!”
Lawmakers: “Ok then, here is a bill which gives gays the same rights and responsibilities as marriage that doesn’t change to ‘tradtional’ definition of marriage.
Anti-gays: “well, we lied we don’t want them to have any rights. We only said that before so we wouldn’t look like the ogres we are. BUT now that the cat is out of the bag: Homosexuals are filthy perverts who want to destroy christians and rape boys!”
Wash-rinse-repeat.
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