Were the daily totals of rejected signatures for Ref. 71 meaningless?
Overnight, the rejected signatures appear to have gone from 4057 rejected to 3559 rejected. You will find the totals here.
David Ammons the Secretary of State’s communications director and senior policy advisor explained it like this:
A further factor I haven’t even gotten into is that I’m told a small number of signatures that were rejected by the checker can be accepted by a super-checker who reviews all of the work. This all means there is a little bit of moving around of the numbers that is inherent in the process. Sorry it’s a tad messy to be releasing unofficial numbers, but we decided to be totally transparent in sharing the whole vetting process … and both sides have observers on site.
That would give the measure a rejection rate of 11.63% which would be within the rate needed to qualify for the ballot. We’ll see if the numbers get corrected again.
UPDATE: KnowThyNeighbor.org has found out that…
there is an adjudication process for questionable signatures that has resulted in 409 “reversals” (i.e. an invalid signature being declared a valid signature) after review by more senior staff.
This is about to get really messy.
UPDATE: David Ammons explains what happened here.
Elections Division has decided that a more accurate cumulative error or rejection rate (currently 11.63 percent) should reflect the sizable number of signatures that have been going from the rejected pile to the accepted stack after a master checker reviews the checker’s decision to reject. That is 409 so far.
