The Secretary of State’s office will change the way it is publicly reporting the results of Ref. 71 after a number of rejected signatures were eventually accepted by “senior-checkers” which made the daily updates not add up to the posted totals and drastically changed the results in favor of the referendum. Details are posted here. From now on they will report only once per day and only after a rejected signature has been reviewed a second time.
The plan is for a daily late-afternoon update that shows signature-checking results for each batch of petitions that have been completely checked, and then re-checked by a supervisor. Each batch has 15 petition sheets, with varying numbers of signatures.
The controversy is over the fact that only rejected signatures are being reviewed by “senior-checkers” and those are being overturned, and accepted as valid, by a large margin. Critics point to the fact that supposedly signatures accepted the first time they are checked are not being reviewed again by a senior-checker. As one commenter to the Sec. of State’s website suggested:
Perhaps this new public visibility to the system will reveal that only double checking rejected signatures and not accepted signatures is, perhaps, not the right approach and that it does not ensure a voter’s accesibility to the iniative and referendum process, but rather skews the process to favor one side of an issue.
The first update of valid and invalid signatures under the new system will be released later this afternoon probably some time between 3pm and 5pm.
