Oh to what depths have Gary Randall and Larry Stickney been reduced!  You know they’ve hit rock bottom when they resort to quoting a lefty blogger (after misspelling his name) for “evidence” that the Washington Secretary of State is engaged in, as they so prosaically accuse, “skullduggery”.

UPDATE on the Unhinged: Gary Randall just posted an “Open Letter to the Secretary of State”, which links to this missive penned on his behalf by Obama-birther (twice) attorney Stephen Pidgeon.  The letter begins with a quote from Josef Stalin and ends with the accusation, “Apparently, the personal politics of those employed in your office are allowed to trump the integrity of this process.  This is an outrage.”  Huh.  I thought the outrage was that when you know you have nothing to show before a court of law, you stoop to the court of public opinion.  But what do I know, eh?This is from Randall & Stickney’s latest over-the-top accusation that the Washington Secretary of State and his Elections Division lack professional integrity.

Even left-wing blogger/demographer Daryl Holman of Horsesass.org has expressed curiosity and surprise at some of the statistical abnormalities of the count in recent days.  As Daryl notes in his Wednesday article (Shifting fortunes for R-71?), “This could, conceivably, reflect reduced effort by signature checkers to find the signers in voter rolls.” In Thursday’s article, he wrote the following:  ”in the last several days, there appears to be an unexplained, systematic increase in the rate at which signers are not found in the voting rolls.”

Darryl has been using the to-date signature checking results to predict whether Referendum 71 will qualify for the ballot.  Darryl’s method of analysis is based, in part, on the assumption that the Referendum 71 petition sheets have been shuffled to the degree that the characteristics measured in the signatures already checked are a good predictor of the characteristics of the remaining, unchecked signatures.  Any non-random patchiness in the data (for example, if most of the signatures collected by petition mercenaries happen to lie among the later-checked signatures) smashes this assumption, and thus the accuracy of his predictions.  This is presumably at least part of the reason why we’ve seen his predictions swing so wildly.  

It’s hilarious that Gary & Larry are grasping at the straw of Darryl coming to terms with his own analytical assumptions, because Gary & Larry refuse to question their own assumption that their referendum could never fail to qualify for the ballot simply because they didn’t collect enough signatures.  Shades of 2006 and that unholy 3-way Gary Randall had with Tim Eyman and Pastor Joe Fuiten, when everyone but Gary was apparently responsible for his failure to get his anti-gay R-65 on the ballot.

By the way, Darryl anticipated Gary & Larry’s misuse of this analysis.  This is from the same blog post Gary & Larry quoted above:

The analyses I’ve done here are based on two assumptions: (1) that the signatures evaluated so far are just like signatures that remain to be evaluated, and (2) that the signature validation process is “stable” (the people validating signatures are not changing their standards over time). Today we see some pretty good evidence that one (or both) of these assumptions is (are) violated.

The supporters of R-71 will, no doubt, focus on the second assumption. If the measure fails, Secretary of State Sam Reed will likely take much abuse from fringe homophobes for “personally pushing a homosexual agenda.” To me, the simplest explanation is that the volumes being examined in serial order are chronologically correlated with the signature collection order. ( I don’t know if this is true; but, I cannot rule it out either.)

My thinking is that later-collected signatures (and therefore, later volumes) should have a higher duplication rate, just because there is an increasing chance with time early signers forgot whether or not they signed earlier. Additionally, with the last push of getting as many signatures as possible with an approaching deadline, it seems plausible that errors would increase. I’m thinking errors like collecting more out-of-state signatures, underage signatures, and signatures from people not active on the voter rolls.

Since not all of Darryl’s musings fit well with Gary & Larry’s need to blame others for their own shortcomings, somehow I doubt we’ll ever see them fully and fairly quote Darryl.

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Related:

* Randall & Stickney trying to influence the R-71 validation process with phone calls

REFERENDUM 71

Ballot Title

Statement of Subject: The legislature passed Engrossed Second Substitute Senate Bill 5688 concerning rights and responsibilities of state-registered domestic partners [and voters have filed a sufficient referendum petition on this bill].

Concise Description: This bill would expand the rights, responsibilities, and obligations accorded state-registered same-sex and senior domestic partners to be equivalent to those of married spouses, except that a domestic partnership is not a marriage.

Should this bill be:

Approved ___

Rejected ___

Ballot Measure Summary

Same-sex couples, or any couple that includes one person age sixty-two or older, may register as a domestic partnership with the state. Registered domestic partnerships are not marriages, and marriage is prohibited except between one man and one woman. This bill would expand the rights, responsibilities, and obligations of registered domestic partners and their families to include all rights, responsibilities, and obligations granted by or imposed by state law on married couples and their families.

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