A Steep Climb for Ordinance Foes
Ricky Sullivan gets another signature.
With just two weeks to go to get their ballot initiative qualified, the Citizens for Good Public Policy are a long way from getting it done. They need 5,581 signatures by July 29, and so far they have collected only 1,847. And it gets worse. Of the 1,190 that have been checked so far by the office of the Supervisor of Elections, only 738 are valid city residents, which means they have had an exceptionally high failure rate of 38%. I got these numbers from SOE just yesterday by going down there and talking to one of the clerks.
I am, by nature, a suspicious person, so I asked why there was such a high failure rate. The clerk I spoke with said tha t she can only speak for the petitions that she had personally checked, and she said that it was residency that kept tripping people up. My other question was where this 5,581 number came from to begin with. She said that it needed 10% of the registered voters in the city to sign petitions. When I ran for a county-wide office in 2002, I only needed 1260 signatures, or 1% of the registered voters, to get on the ballot. Why was there such a high threshold for this item? And if it’s because it’s a law and not a candidate, did the two charter amendments on the city’s 2003 ballot both have to pass the same test? I could not get an answer to that at this time, but SOE is certainly welcome to have their day on this website.
I found the failure rate stunning, but sadly believable. People who are not used to engaging the system make a lot of mistakes. When I get signatures for a candidate, I always have to double check their work, and I frequently find unfilled blanks and information that does not match their voter ID. And most of the voters I have encountered are not even aware that their precinct numbers and voting districts are all on their voter IDs in their wallets. Volunteers really have to know what they are doing, or they do a lot of work for nothing.
Of course, if you do the math you can see that 4800 more signatures needed divided by 14 days (about 343) divided by 20 volunteers makes a little over 17 signatures per volunteer per day. It’s still a tough number, but it shows how steady, careful effort can get it done.
