UPDATE: Alert readers eury13 and Ron Newman note that the city clerk’s office may not have rejected the excess signatures — they may just have stopped counting when it was clear that Wilkerson had enough. So it may be that there’s nothing amiss here. Title has been edited. Thanks to the commenters who pointed this out! South End News has added a clarification further explaining what appears to have happened. Bottom line seems to be that there is no story here.
This is just weird. The Globe reported today that Sen. Dianne Wilkerson, seeking to avoid a repeat of embarrassingly having to run a write in campaign to retain her seat, trumpeted her submission of 3,000 signatures.
This year, Wilkerson qualified for the primary ballot with a whopping 3,000 signatures, 10 times the amount she needed.
“I wanted to dispel any notion as early in the process as possible of just how serious I am about this race,” Wilkerson said.
“I would never allow myself to be engaged in a sticker campaign again. That is the loudest and clearest way I can answer that question.”
And yet, the South End News now says that of those 3,000, only 428 were certified by the Secretary of State’s office — more than the required 300, but only a 14% success rate. I understand that the signature rules are tough, but rejecting 86% of the submitted signatures seems awfully high. [NOTE: see update above — the signatures may not have been rejected after all.]
And now, a little Jeopardy: what is the question to which a 14% success rate with certifying signatures is the “loud” and “clear” answer?
After all, if she went knocking on doors in neighborhoods in which
* many people aren’t registered at all
* many people move often, and therefore their address doesn’t match the file
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p>then it’d be easy to have lots of invalid signatures. 6 out of every 7 invalid? That’s quite a lot… but depending on just where she went looking for sigs, it’s not entirely unreasonable.
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p>Note: were I on her staff, I’d have gotten 300+ from places like Dem Ward Committee meetings, etc… find folks who you know are regular, stable voters, and get enough of them. Then, go door to door in neighborhoods where people ought to like her but not necessarily be registered, and have them sign and fill out a voter reg form. Then, just hand in the voter reg forms a few weeks before the sigs, and you’re all set.
This is turning out to be an interesting race.
believing she’d get that many invalid signatures from going door to door. I think a better guess would be a few overzealous volunteers doing all in their power to make sure she wasn’t off the ballot, without any of the hard work or know how. Oops. (Just speculating, as dangerous as that is LOL!!)
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p>However, very good idea about voter reg forms. That’s some very good thinking.
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p>And, yes, this will be an interesting race. Both candidates are great on the issues – near perfect, really. So, this race becomes about Wilkerson’s time spent in the leg (and all the perks that come with it) versus Change Diaz’s clean-government message. It was a near tie last time, who knows what it will be this time – or if the 14% mark will come into play.
I said speculating was dangerous!
It’s also likely that signatures were gathered at post offices and grocery stores, where people signing might not be part of her district.
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p>Wilkerson’s district isn’t like a suburban district where you have several towns all spread out and most people at the local post office actually live in the same senate district. It’s compact enough that there’s a good chance that people gathering signatures were either venturing off into places like the South Bay shopping center, where you’d get people from a half-dozen Senate districts; or people from other districts, like Jack Hart’s or Marian Walsh’s, were running errands in Wilkerson’s district and asked to sign.
heck, why doesn’t city hall just register all the names on petitions, if that’s all it takes.
Is that you fill out the form.
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p>Oh, and you sign the part that emphasizes that if you commit voter fraud, you’re looking at a $10,000 fine and/or five years in the can.
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p>There are extremely few cases of people who are not eligible to vote committing individual cases of voter fraud, and none that I’ve ever heard of where the result of an election was in question because of alleged voter fraud by individuals.
Was anyone else disappointed by the Globe’s article? It’s the subject of my blog today.
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p>Ya, in a town newspaper, you can pretty much expect WickedLocal (etc) to just print up the press release… but Drake could have been more thorough: he certainly missed a great – and far more fun – story. The Globe should be a bit shamed to be so outdone by today’s South End News article.
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p>I will say that after the chest-pumping the Globe did for Wilkerson on the awesome momentum of 3000 428 signatures, the rest of the article was very good. I posted some commentary on it at my blog.
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p>Also, LeftAhead did a great interview with Chang-Diaz a few weeks ago that people should check out.
From what I understand, town clerks and the Secretary only have to certify something like 20% over the necessary amount, not matter how many the campaigns turn in. It doesn’t make sense for state resources to be spent counting and certifying 10x as many signatures as a candidate needs.
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p>Ergo, I don’t think Wilkerson’s rate was only 14%, I just think they stopped counting once it was clear she was well over what she needed.
The election department of a city or town is required to certify only 140% of the signatures that are needed to get on the ballot. Therefore, they were allowed to stop any time after they reached 420.
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p>Source: Candidates’ Guide to the 2008 Election, on Secretary of State Galvin’s web site.
Actual people have to sign off on these signatures. I was talking to one of our election commissioners yesterday who expressed relief that she was done signing off on all the single-page ballot initiative signature sheets.
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p>Wilkerson made her symblic point. There’s no reason to force the election officials to do more work than they have to.
David, could you verify this info and if it’s correct, update your diary? This was exactly what I thought when I first read it – they wouldn’t waste the time going through all 3000 once they certified a significant number above the necessary number.
The story as written reads like a “gotcha” on Wilkerson
Go here
who are looking for evidence that you don’t know how to organize a signature gathering campaign?
Whas’up TheHillHasEyes? I was trying to be funny not snarky. Oh well.
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p>ITIOFD – I’m a long time supporter of Diane Wilkerson
“How would you describe Ogo’s Senate campaign bid?”
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p>(I gave you a compensating six – theyse people have no sense of humor).
shouldn’t you change the headline?