The Secretary of State continues to verify signatures during the referendum 71 qualification process. There is a lot of chatter on blogs and newspapers about whether referendum 71 will qualify, and several people are beginning to jump to the false conclusion that because the data is showing an increasing number of invalid signatures that this fight is nearly over. At this early stage it is not only mathematically inaccurate to draw conclusions based on daily counts, it is politically dangerous.
The Secretary of State announced today that they have a raw count of 137, 689 signatures on the R-71 petition. 120,557 valid signatures are needed to qualify referendum 71 for the ballot. Historically 18% of signatures are invalid for various reasons. The cushion for R-71 is 14.2 %, so we are still in the too close to call range. Because the margin is so close, the Secretary of State’s office will conduct a line by line review of the petition and will compare every signature against the voting record. If a signature does not match the voting record it will be disqualified. If there are duplicate signatures the duplicates will be removed.