FRESNO – The county-wide transportation sales tax initiative that proponents hope will replace Fresno County’s Measure C has not qualified for the general election ballot — yet.
A petition to put the initiative — known as Better Roads, Safe Streets — on the ballot didn’t quite pass the test that would have automatically qualified it to go before voters in November. It did, however, reach a threshold needed to advance further in the process, and campaign manager Andy Levine said the campaign is certain the measure will qualify.
“We have full confidence in the registrar of voters (and) in the county to do this with efficiency, responsibility and to make sure that we absolutely respect the will of thousands of voters who have said loud and clear, ‘We want this on the ballot,’” Levine said.
Levine told reporters gathered in downtown Fresno May 20 that the elections office had finished its initial count of petition signatures the campaign submitted and notified Better Roads, Safe Streets of its progress on May 18.
“What they found was that we had more than enough to be able to move on to the next step,” Levine said. “We didn’t have quite enough to automatically qualify, … but more than enough to be able to move onto the full count, which we welcome, are excited about and have even more confidence than before that we will have more than … we need to be able to qualify for the ballot.”
The initiative needs 21,909 valid signatures from registered voters to qualify. It must reach this threshold — and then formally be placed on the ballot via a resolution from the Fresno County Board of Supervisors — before Aug. 7 in order to appear on the November ballot.
Making the ballot
From outside the Fresno County Registrar of Voters office, County Clerk James Kus told reporters that by law, his office has 90 working days after the petition is submitted to complete the full count of signatures. Starting from April 14, that deadline is Aug. 21 — two weeks after the deadline for measures to be submitted to the ballot.
The full count will be completed by Aug. 21, Kus said, but when it may be done before then, he said he does not know and cannot commit to.
“Is qualifying for the November ballot still a possibility? Absolutely,” Kus said. “But we do have to go through and review and find, are there 21,909 valid signatures there. The random examination actually indicates that there probably will be, but we have to go through and find that out.”
The moment the elections office counts the 21,909th valid signature, it will stop the full count and bring its results to the board of supervisors.
One point of possible concern is that the board of supervisors only has four regular meetings set between now and Aug. 7, with the last meeting scheduled for July 14. Kus said meeting that date is “definitely doable,” but not a promise he can make.
The county elections office is currently juggling signature verification for seven other statewide propositions and preparing for the June 2 primary election. Kus said the primary election results won’t be certified until the end of June.
“We do work all the way through that period, … but what parts and what teams, where staffing is required, does change, and so we will be able to shift resources as we go through election day and then the post-election day canvass period and some of that shifting is going to be able to shift resources over to petition review,” Kus said.
Signature counting
On April 14, Better Roads, Safe Streets submitted its petition to put a half-cent transportation sales tax on the county-wide ballot in November.
In order to qualify citizen-led petitions for the ballot, proponents must circulate a petition and receive a specific minimum number of signatures from the area’s registered voters. That number is equal to 10% of the total number of ballots cast for governor within the related jurisdiction in the most recent gubernatorial election.
For an initiative that applies to all of Fresno County, that number is 21,909. Better Roads, Safe Streets submitted approximately 32,500 signatures on its petition.
Kus said this qualified the petition for what’s called a random sample count. A random sample, as opposed to a full count, is a faster way to verify that a petition meets the minimum signature requirement to qualify.
Kus explained that his office first determined the number of signatures on the petition that was turned in. For the random sample, the elections office would have to look at either 500 signatures or 3% of the total, whichever is higher.
In this case, it was 3%, which equaled 977 randomly selected signatures from the total number submitted, Kus said. From those, the elections office found that approximately 77% of the signatures were valid.
When using a random sample, the percentage of valid signatures from the sample is then applied to the total number of signatures submitted. However, within the signatures that were invalid, the elections office found two duplicates — meaning two instances in which a registered voter had signed the same petition twice.
The presence of those duplicates created a penalty that the county elections office had to apply when comparing the random sample to the total number of submitted signatures. When that was done, Kus said the elections office ended up with an estimated valid count of 104% of the required minimum number of signatures.
“In the random sample examination, you must clear 110% to move forward,” Kus said. “If you don’t, if you fall between 95% and 110%, then we go to a full count examination, and that is what we’ve begun to do for this petition.”
This situation is not uncommon, Kus said, as voters can easily forget which petitions they’ve signed, especially when presented with many at one time, and end up signing a petition twice. Out of seven random samples for statewide proposition petitions the elections office has reviewed so far this year, four had duplicate signatures in them, Kus said.
Additionally, Kus said that the statewide propositions have averaged between 68% and 72% valid signatures in the random sample.
“So I do have to say, the Better Roads, Safer Street group did have a pretty good collection of signatures,” Kus said.
