The Secretary of State has begun posting the random sample updates for Tim Draper’s initiative to divide the state into six Californias. You can find the most current update at http://www.sos.ca.gov/election… but I’ll summarize today’s for you.
According to the report, Draper turned in 1,038,836 raw signatures. He needs at least 807,615 of them to be valid for his measure to get on the ballot. That’s 77.7% of his raw count. Keep that number in mind; we’ll need it later.
First the SoS does (or rather, the counties do) a random sampling. Each county verifies 3% of the raw signatures at random (or 500, if greater, or all of them, if fewer) and projects from that a validity rate. If they project that he has at least 888,377 valid signatures (110% of the requirement, and 88.5% of the raw count), then the measure qualifies. If they project that he has fewer than 767,235 valid signatures (95% of the requirement; 73.9% of the raw count), then it doesn’t qualify. If they project a number somewhere in between those two limits, they have to check every signature.
As of 1:24pm today, results are in from Sierra, Solano, Sonoma, and Sutter counties. In Sierra County, they checked all 208 signatures and found 159 (76.4%) to be valid. In each of the other counties they had to check 500 signatures. The validity rates were 67.4 (Solano), 64.6% (Sonoma), and 77.8% (Sutter)(*). Overall, out of 1,708 signatures checked, 1,208 were found to be valid, for an overall validity rate of 70.7%.
Now 1,708 is less than two-tenths of a percent of the signatures Draper collected, and it could be that he’ll have a higher validity rate in the rest of the state. But if Sutter turns out to be his best county, Six Californias won’t be on the ballot.
(*) The right-most column of the spreadsheet reports different percentages but they don’t agree with the simple calculations of 337/500, 323/500, and 389/500, respectively. I don’t know how the SoS got those other numbers and perhaps someone with a day job that allows them that kind of research can contact the SoS and find out what they are doing differently.
Ballotopedia records that the supporters claimed they submitted 1.3 million signatures: http://ballotpedia.org/%22Six_…
The counties that haven’t reported, Alameda, Alpine, Amador, Calaveras, Humboldt, Inyo, Kings, Modoc, Mono, Nevada, Trinity, and Ventura have a population of 1510+1+38+46+135+185+153+10+14+98+14+823= about 3 million signatures, about 8% of the stat’s total population. So they can probably expect another 1038*.08 = 83,000 signatures, or 1.1 million total. That’s a pretty big gap between their claim and the raw count.