More on the reversal of those “invalid” signatures for Ref. 71 by the state’s “master checkers” is over at The Stranger. Seems they reversed 409 votes yet there were not even that many votes that did not match their signature file. So where did they come from?
But it can take a day or more for master checkers to review all disqualified signatures. “They take more time to do this and have more experience doing searches on middle names and partial addresses,” says Hanlin. “They use more sophisticated techniques to finds a match. Those 409 signatures were overturned based on that process.”
The fact that they mention partial addresses must mean they are pulling some of the invalid signatures from the list of invalid non-registered voters based on being able track down their registration using a partial address.
So far as of Friday afternoon 35,296 “Signatures Checked”, 31,199 “Signatures Accepted” and 4,063 “Signatures Currently Rejected” which equals 11.51% “Percent of Signatures Currently Rejected”. There are 34 “Signatures Currently Pending” that have been initially checked.
This means that 25% of the signatures have been checked and the rate of invalid signatures (11.51%) is less than 1% from the 12.43% error rate that the measure cannot exceed and still make it to the ballot in November.
Like I said, it’s going to get messy but I would assume the rate of duplicate signatures will increase as the counting continues and that rate has increased every day so far from .2% on the first day to .76% yesterday.
