The latest signature update for Referendum 71 indicates that well over 125,000 signatures have been reviewed, with almost 111,000 of them being accepted.
About 8,500 signatures have been counted since Wednesday’s update, bringing the cumulative total to 125,631 checked signatures. Of this total, 110,797 have been accepted and 14,834 have been rejected for one reason or another. The overall error rate is now 11.81 percent, barely down from the 11.85 percent reported Wednesday. In order to make the November statewide ballot, the referendum’s overall rejection rate must not go over 12.4 percent.
The R-71 sponsors, Protect Marriage Washington, need 120,577 valid Washington voter signatures for the measure to be placed on the ballot. Elections Director Nick Handy has announced that the signature check is expected to be finished by September 1.
And now, the breakdown of the rejections: 11,798 people whose registration were not found, 1,256 whose petition signature did not match the one on file, 1,730 duplicates and 50 cases where checkers have asked the voter’s home county for an electronic signature that can be compared with the signature on the petition.
For those of you following the “third check,” Elections Division staff looked up 2,141 petition signers on the live voter registration database Tuesday and Wednesday and accepted 279 (13 percent) of them as registered voters. These signers were in Volumes 267 through 364. Altogether, after a review of Volumes 1-364, the Elections Division has “accepted” 991 previously “not founds” and rejected five instances in which the signer had signed the petition twice. Check out this spreadsheet for more details. The third check process was started as a way to review the names of petition signers whose names did not appear on the snapshot of the voter registration database that checkers had been using from the start of the checking process. The live version of this database is being used to check those names in question.
The R-71 sponsors are trying to overturn the recently adopted “everything but marriage” law (SB 5688) that expands state rights and responsibilities to state-registered domestic partners so that they equal those granted to married couples.
