Referendum 71 Signature Errors 1% From Max Survivor Rate; Right Wing Sweating Bullets

UPDATE: The right wingers certainly are squirming and furious that the error rate is increasing.

The Secretary of State's blog reports:

Sponsors of Referendum 71, the effort to overturn Washington’s new “everything but marriage” domestic partnership law, are accusing the state Elections Division of rushing the signature-verification process and being biased against their effort. Election officials at the Secretary of State’s office are pushing back, strongly defending their crew of signature-checkers as conducting the process with great care and diligence, not rushing through – and certainly not showing bias one way or the other about the legislation in question.

Gary Randall of the Faith and Freedom Network, part of the campaign group called Protect Marriage Washington, made its allegations in an e-mailed “state wide call to action and prayer,” saying the “homosexual lobby” had pressured the Secretary to accelerate the signature check. That had the effect of boosting the group’s error rate due to “carelessness and/or sympathy for the other side,” he wrote. The group flooded the Secretary’s offices with hundreds of phone calls, emails and blog comments.

Give me a break. When the Secretary of State earlier reported that the error rate dropped due to recalculations (and some say had to recount signatures), they didn't care that the counting process could've been compromised as long as it was in their favor. And now that it isn't, somehow it's now a conspiracy!

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Washington state election officials say they've verified almost 70,000 of 137,689 Referendum 71 signatures, a petition which hopes to overthrow the "everything much marriage" domestic partnership law that passed recently at the ballot, giving same-sex couples all the state rights of marriage without the name.

"As of the Wednesday evening report, Elections Division crews have now checked 79,195 names submitted by the sponsors," said secretary of state spokesman David Ammons. "The error rate rose again in the latest count, to 11.67 percent cumulatively. If they're to qualify for the ballot, backers need to keep their error rate under 12.4 percent by the time all 137,689 of their signatures are checked. The bottom line, so far, is that 69,949 signatures have been accepted. It takes 120,577 valid Washington signatures to place a referendum on the ballot."

That's less than 1% away from the maximum error rate that the referendum can survive under. The right wing sponsors must be sweating bullets if they hope to strip the rights away of same-sex couples in Washington State, something they've obviously become addicted to doing.

They may need rehab if they don't succeed.

The break point comes when either 17,113 signatures are invalidated or 120,577 signatures are validated.

Referendum 71 voters will be asked to approve or reject the domestic partnership law in November. Vote "APPROVED" to preserve the new domestic partnership law. Sign up with Washington Families Standing Together to help get the word out.