You’ve probably heard by now that Six Californias failed to qualify for the ballot. You can read about it on the SoS website temporarily here and here, and more permanently here. The official announcement that went out to the County Clerks and Registrars of Voters can be downloaded from here.

Given all that, this will be my final report on the signature qualification effort of Six Californias. It will contain more information than you will read in the media.

The last five counties reported their random sampling results in Friday’s final update: Inyo (validity rate 80.7%; they did a full count), Los Angeles (61.4%), Mariposa (67.0%), San Benito (63.1%; full count), and Trinity (66.7%). Raw counts were changed for Plumas County (an increase of 33) and Trinity (a loss of 15), for a net increase of 18 signatures, bringing the final raw count to 1,137,844 (was 1,137,826). In addition, Yuba corrected their duplicate count from 2 to 8, reducing their validity rate from 58.8% to 51.1%.

Also, the date in which Alpine County submitted their random count was corrected to August 4th (was incorrectly reported as August 14th), and the typo I reported in Report #8 in Ventura County’s random count submission date was corrected to August 15th (was July 18th, before the July 30th date when they submitted their raw count).

The overall validity rate went down to 66.15% (was 67.96%), for a projected valid signature count of 752,685, a whopping 14,550 short of what was needed to qualify for a full count. (Another way of looking at it is they had 93% of what they needed for the ballot, not the 95% needed to qualify for a full count.)

As I stated in my previous report, if Los Angeles came in under 65.7%, Six Californias would not qualify. Los Angeles came in at 61.4%, and the initiative did not.

I hope you’ve enjoyed this series. I had fun writing it. (To those of you who suggested I go into journalism, thanks, but no thanks. I’m keeping my day job.) I’ll respond to comments to this and previous diary entries as time permits, but I have no plans to do this sort of thing again, at least not until another initiative catches my interest.

I do invite you to check out Californians for Electoral Reform. We are a non-partisan (more accurately, multi-partisan) organization that does educational and advocacy work around instant runoff voting and proportional representation, as we believe these electoral reforms will result in better representation for all Californians than top-two primaries in single-member districts with independent redistricting can provide. We are an all-volunteer organization (no paid staff), so our strength is in our membership (dues are only $25/year). You might enjoy reading the answers to our questionnaire submitted by all the Secretary of State candidates prior to the June primary. Of course, you’ll be most interested in the answers of (in alphabetical order) Alex Padilla and Pete Peterson.

–Steve Chessin

President, Californians for Electoral Reform (CfER)

www.cfer.org

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