Commissioners use faulty "citizen" petition to place new tax on the ballot

Report by Citizen Review Online

October 11, 2005

Clallam County, WA - County commissioners claimed that the reason they decided to proceed with placing another new tax on the ballot was because of citizens presenting petitions with "4,201" signatures requesting the tax.

When the news was originally broken about the new tax, statements were made that "over 4,000" signatures had been presented.

Curious as to the accuracy of those statements, Citizen Review purchased copies of all the petitions delivered to the county commissioners, and then typed them into a database.

Here are the results of what we learned:

The petitions start out with 4087 signatures, according to the copies received from the county commissioners’ office.

After purging more than 530 duplicate signatures, the out-of-county signatures and those without addresses, only 3,556 remain. Approximately 7% of the signatures were from outside Clallam County.

No one has certified how many of those signatures are registered voters – as would be required to place an initiative or referendum by the people on the ballot. From an initial random overview of checking registered voters against names, it appears that approximately 20% of nonvoters.

That would leave approximately 2,800 valid signatures.

Of those, we have talked to a random sampling of those who signed the petition, and were told they didn’t really know what they were signing.

Click here to see an alphabetized list of the original signatures as presented to the county commissioners.