Thursday’s update included completed random samples from three more counties: Alameda (validity rate 67.6%), Calaveras (73.2%), and Tehama (66.9%). The overall validity rate is up slightly, from 66.9% to 67.0%, for a projected total valid signature count of 762,328 (up from 761,190 in my previous report), still not enough to qualify for a full count. That requires 767,235 projected valid signatures.

Eighteen counties still have to complete their random sampling. The top ten (by the number of raw signatures they reported) are now Los Angeles (311,924 raw signatures), Riverside (74,478), Orange (52,217), Fresno (38,382), San Luis Obispo (12,906), El Dorado (11,649), Humboldt (7,230), Tuolumne (4,732), Nevada (4,322), and Santa Cruz (3,742).

Jim Riley posted an interesting comment to Report #11. One of his points is (I think) that the estimate of duplicates has a wide variance, and this can cause an initiative to fail to qualify based on the sampling when a full count would show that it had sufficient signatures. It might be interesting to look at the qualification rules used by other states that have the initiative.

Updated September 3rd: I made a mistake in Report #11 (since fixed) where I counted Kern County in the top 10 unfinished counties when it had actually completed its random sampling. That mistake was carried over into the original version of this report. I have fixed it above by removing Kern and adding Santa Cruz.

–Steve Chessin

President, Californians for Electoral Reform (CfER)

www.cfer.org

The opinions expressed here are my own and not necessarily those of CfER.