Oops. I significantly underestimated the number of unecessary extra signatures that King County Elections has decided to examine in order to qualify I-24 and I-25 for the November ballot.

My Wednesday post reported that they would be checking "109,000 signatures for both initiatives", but the real number is probably closer to 144,000.

The 109,000 was only the number of valid signatures that the two initiatives need (54,732 each). In practice, every initiative also has a percentage of rejected signatures. A typical validity rate is about 80%. (I-25 submitted plenty more signatures than needed with 80% validity). Assuming 80% validity for both initiatives, the Elections Office would expect to check 137,000 signatures to qualify both.

Rumored Superintendent-nominee Garth Fell informed the Council that he would check an additional 5% cushion, bringing the total number to 144,000. That's quite a bit more than the 4,700 they could check with a statistical sample. Fell also told the Council that

King County does not use a statistical sampling of signatures on petitions

if I had to do two at once, and if there were a fairly substantial number of signatures more than the minimum which would likely mean the count would not be very close, I would have gone to the WAC alternative, especially if I thought that meeting deadlines would be a problem.