Washington state anti-gay referendum: Number of bogus signatures increases

[Newsjock]

Source: The Stranger

At the current rate election workers are disqualifying petition signatures for anti-gay Referendum 71, the measure will fail to qualify for the ballot. In their fourth day of counting, officials counted 6,140 petition signatures, finding that, of those, only 5,268 were valid. That calculates to an error rate of 14.2 percent.

Referendum backers turned in 137,689 signatures on July 25, and they need 120,577 valid signatures to qualify for the ballot. The referendum needs an error rate of less than 12.4 percent to make it to the general election.

Thus far, 23,457 names have been checked, 20,335 accepted and 3,122 rejected—which is total error rate of 13.31 percent.

“That is about one percent under water,” says secretary of state’s office spokesman David Ammons. Most of the invalid signatures were disqualified because the signer's name did not appear on state voter rolls.

Read more: http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2009/08/05/r-71-rate-of-invalid-signatures-creeps-up

[badgerpup]

1. Color me so not surprised...n/t

:eyes: