Five(!) counties reported their random sampling results Tuesday: El Dorado (validity rate 76.8%), Glenn (70.1%), Humboldt (60.3%), Lassen (65.9%), and Nevada (72.7%). In addition, El Dorado reported eight fewer signatures in their raw count than they had initially, and Nevada County reported an additional signature, bringing the total raw count down slightly to 1,137,797. The overall validity rate is up slightly to 67.58% (was 67.48%, for a projected valid signature count of 768,923, a comfortable 1,688 more than needed to qualify for a full count.
Seven counties still have to complete their random sampling. They are (in order of the number of raw signatures they reported) Los Angeles (311,924 raw signatures), Fresno (38,382), Tuolumne (4,732), Mariposa (945), Trinity (779), Inyo (616), and San Benito (350). Los Angeles and Fresno have to check 3% of their signatures, and San Benito has to check all 350; the others have to check 500 (unless they want to check them all). I hope we don’t have to wait until Friday for them all to report.
My feeling is much of it boils down to Los Angeles. While I don’t think Los Angeles by itself will put them over the number they need to qualify for a full count (for that it would have to have a remarkably high 77.0% or better validity rate), it could make it mathematically impossible for the rest of the counties to put them over. That is, if the validity rate from Los Angeles ends up less than about 62.3%, then even if the other counties had 100% valid signatures Six Californias would not qualify for a full count and would not make it to the ballot. (At this point it is mathematically impossible for Six Californias to qualify for the ballot based on random sampling alone, even if Los Angeles had a 100% projected validity rate.)
I note that only three counties had a validity rate of 77.0% or greater. On the other hand, thirteen counties had a validity rate of 62.3% or lower. It’s likely that Los Angeles will have a validity rate somewhere in between those extremes, meaning we’ll need reports from at least Fresno and Tuolumne counties, if not all of them, to learn if Six Californias will get a full count.
–Steve Chessin
President, Californians for Electoral Reform (CfER)
www.cfer.org
The opinions expressed here are my own and not necessarily those of CfER.
Dear Mr. Chessin:
I am curious. Speaking for yourself and not for CiER, are you in support of the Six Californias Initiative or opposed to it?
For my part, I would like to see it voted on if for no other reason than to encourage the public discourse.
With respectful regards,
Margaret Midge
Los Angeles makes up about 87% of the remaining signatures to sample – their validity rate will dominate by a ratio of 7:1 over what the remaining counties count.
67.10% of the unsampled signatures must be projected to be valid for the initiative to qualify for a full count. The sample rate so far projects that it will surpass that threshold by a mere 1718 signatures, but fall 38,662 signatures below the threshold to qualify.
The projected number of duplicates is 45584, with a dupe rate of 5.6%. If the actual dupe rate is 2.7% (the median of all counties sampled so far), that would restore about 16k signatures, a tad under half of what is needed to get from the projected count to the number needed to qualify for the ballot.