An Update On The AB 1266 Signature Drive Spot Check Count

Quoting my anonymous peer activist friend whose helping me with the numbers:

San Diego County is in and puts the pro-trans side in a better place than it found itself Friday. Only three counties to go: Los Angeles, San Bernardino and Nevada. I’m getting a feeling this may not make it from spot-checking to the full count. Duplicate signatures in spot-checking drive down validity rate dramatically. San Diego County had a whopping 4 duplicates in spot-checking, but this forced its validity rate down more than 5 percentage points over what it would have been with no duplicates. This does make one wonder what would have happened if a different 3% of signatures had been randomly checked, but, hey, the rules are the rules.

Since I last updated the count (and it was a quite a while ago), approximately 5,000 votes have been added to the count from counties that previously weren’t in the count. So now the total signatures submitted count is up from 614,311 signatures to 619,233.

So, this update is accurate as of the January 6, 2014 found on the California Secretary of State’s page on the AB1266 referendum update page.

Onto the data and information:

  • Counties that have completed the spot-checking of signature validity: 55 of 58. The three counties remaining are Los Angeles, San Bernardino, and Nevada counties.
  • Percentage of total signatures turned in that have been through spot-checking: 67.6%.
  • Number of total raw signatures turned into county officials: 619,233.
  • Number of those that MUST be valid (in this or any such referendum) to force a people’s vote on California’s new law that lets trans students access the facilities and sports teams that accord with their gender identity: 504,760.
  • Number that must be PROJECTED to be valid at the conclusion of spot-checking to allow the measure to survive and move from spot-checking to a full check of every signature: 479,522 (95% of 504,760).
  • Validity rate of all 619,233 signatures that were collected this time that must occur in order to go to the ballot: 81.51374%. (504,760 divided by 619,233)
  • PROJECTED validity rate in spot-checking of all 619,233 signatures that were collected this time that must occur if this is to survive spot-checking and go to a full check of each and every signature: 77.43805%. (479,522 divided by 619,233.)
  • CURRENT validity rate of signatures at this point, with 55 of 58 counties having completed spot-checking of 67.6% of the total signatures turned in: 77.59%. (This figure is not an average of the percentages in the last column on the report from the Secretary of State — it is weighted by the number of signatures each county contributed to the overall effort. Two big counties — Los Angeles and San Bernardino — accounting for 31% of all signatures collected — have not yet reported.]
  • At this current spot check validity rate the repeal proponents would advance from spot-checking to a full count of all signatures to see if they could hit 81.51374% validity, which would force a voter referendum on California’s law that lets trans students access the facilities and sports teams that accord with their gender identity. As of the moment, projections give them a cushion of 3,355 signatures for moving to the next step, the full count.
  • Spot-check deadline: Jan. 8 — and that’s this coming Wednesday.
  • Failure to qualify a referendum on AB1266 wouldn’t preclude a federal lawsuit towards the goal of declaring AB1266 unconstitutional.