They only turned in about 10,000 “spare” signatures at the June 30 deadline, but those behind a petition drive to bring the recently-enacted Congressional districts to referendum felt confident they would have just enough signatures to place the matter on the November 6 ballot, and preliminary numbers seem to bear them out.
Out of the 65,722 signatures given to the state Board of Elections, 44,310 – or roughly 2/3 – have been verified by the state. At this point the drive sits at 39,516 validated signatures, which means just 16,220 out of 21,412 of the remaining names need to be acceptable. The history of these recent referendum petitions suggests that only about 10 percent of the signatures have been ruled invalid; if that trend holds the drive will end up in the range of 59,000 valid signatures and would be on the ballot.
(continued at Examiner.com…)