It's time to stop speculating and see what we're dealing with here.
Last Friday, we got a couple of clues from a Stamford Advocate article as to how many of the 18,000 signatures submitted to get Joe Lieberman on the ballot were valid. The town clerks should have received the petitions on Monday, so by now, they should be able to tell us what they're finding.
The down side is that there are 168 different town clerks to call. So follow me over the flip, and see how you can help pin down some hard numbers today, since hard numbers seem to be in short supply from our intrepid journalist corps...
"In the last 10 days, 500 signatures have been certified by our office," said Alice Fortunato, Democratic registrar in Lieberman's birthplace of Stamford. Fortunato said they were returned to the town clerk and should be en route to Bysiewicz.
Shirley Surgeon, Hartford's Democratic registrar of voters, said she is verifying 59 pages of signatures delivered to that city's town clerk last week.
Although each petition contains room for 30 signatures, Surgeon said the majority of those she received contain about half that, and several have been disqualified.
"Out of 15 on this first page, nine were good," Surgeon said.
In Norwalk, Town Clerk Andrew Garfunkel said he received one petition page Wednesday.
Norwalk Democratic Registrar Betty Bondi said if the rest of Lieberman's petitions are as "sloppy" as that one piece of paper, his chances to make it onto the ballot do not look good.
"There were less than 10 names and only two good signatures," Bondi said.
All things being equal, if more than 40% of the signatures are good, then Lieberman will likely be on the ballot. Less, and he won't be. And, wonder of wonders, the Town Clerks (or rather, the Registrar of Voters in each Town Clerk's office) seem to be willing to answer media inquiries about how many signatures were submitted, and how many were considered valid, even before submitting them to the Secretary of the State.
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How you can help
It occurred to me the other day that Google Spreadsheets have some interesting possibilities for elections reporting - allowing for simultaneous, multi-user, online editing of spreadsheets into a template. I don't mean to be pimping google products here, but I thought I'd give it a try, and see if it winds up being practical for this kind of research project.
And damned if that wouldn't have been a lot more convenient on 8/8, when every reporting site on the internet was going down in flames - and several blog kids had the precinct-by-precinct returns as they were coming in.
If you have a gmail account, drop me a line at scvmatt at gmail, and I will send you an invitation to edit the spreadsheet. If you don't, or can't be arsed, you can visit this link and use an account I created for the purpose - login name is "dkos.spreadsheet" and the password is "metajesus". You can also just log into gmail.com with that name and password, and the invitation is sitting in the inbox. But then you get a generic name in the chat window there.
How this should work
This should start at 9:15am EST, or 6:15 PST. Give the poor secretaries a few minutes to get a cup of, erm, joe before asking them to dig up stats for you. Before you call, type your initials or your dkos UID to reserve the towns that you want to call after 9:15.
1) When you call, put an X in the "contacted" column so we know it's been done.
2) If you get someone, say that you're calling to inquire about the petitions submitted by the Joe Lieberman Senate campaign. Feel free to call yourself an independent journalist, or blogger if you're feeling lucky, and ask to speak to someone in the Clerk's office who can give you the number of submitted and confirmed signatures.
3) If you get punted to another office, or are told to call back at a different time, mark the relevant info in Column E - Followup Notes
4) Mark down each of the statistics, if they'll give them to you, in each of columns F-I. Be sure to ask if their count has already eliminated petition forms with invalid petition gatherer information, and if the number they've given you is the number that they will be sending to the Secretary of State to tally.
5) Make a note of the date and time that you updated the spreadsheet.
Alright, I hope a few of you guys are up and interested in this - again, email me at scvmatt [at] gmaildotcom if you want me to send you an invite.
If there's anything that needs to change, or if you have more exciting spreadsheet abilities than I do, comment here before the 9:15 EST and we can modify the template so it's as useful as possible. I understand that more complex auto-updating formulas are possible, and I'd be open to having an ambitious kossack set that up on the spreadsheet (use Sheet2 or Sheet3 to test) if you'd like.
I'll post updates here every so often after this thing gets started.
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UPDATE: 1130a PST / 230p EST:
From the results we've seen up on the board so far, it looks like the Town Clerks will certify enough signatures to get Lieberman on the ballot. The spreadsheet was set up with rough "targets" on the far right that Lieberman would need to surpass, and most towns that have offered hard or in-progress counts look to be far surpassing them. Regardless of whether the 18,000 number is correct (which would require a 60% disqualification rate instead of the 20% we're seeing), it isn't looking like Joe will miss 7,500.
The town clerks themselves (pleasant and informative ladies to a person, I'd post some of their photos from the town election pages up in tribute if it weren't so spooky) offered some advice about their process, and recent changes that run counter to the very rough legal advice we've heard around here.
First, petition gatherers must be registered voters within the state on the day they collect the signatures. The text that had circulated on dKos suggested that each gatherer had to live in the town: this is not correct. As a result, it seems that petition gatherers would start a new page when a voter lived in a different town - the majority of petitions seem to only have 1-3 signatures each.
However, the state has no way of verifying that these gatherers are legitimate (the voter files reside with each town's registrar of voters), and the towns have no way of verifying this (since the gatherer is no longer required to be a resident of their town for the petition to be valid). As a result, the verification process is either notarization or the signature of a J.P. or attorney - most towns accept this at face value.
I want to be careful not to promote over-enthusiasm by pointing out a weakness in the process: challenging notarized documents would almost certainly be a matter for the courts. Regardless, for people filling in the spreadsheet numbers, one of the key things that we can learn from the town clerks that we won't learn from the Sec of State is whether the town made an effort to verify the petition gatherer's status apart from the notarization. Whether the clerk knows the numbers or not, please request this piece of information when you call.
Others have mentioned the hired guns, and the requirement that each petition gatherer a) personally verify each person's identity, and b) be a resident and voter in CT. Some Kossacks know some petition gatherers who've been hired from out of state, and if we can connect those individuals to specific notarized petitions, then we could start building a case. This, however, cannot happen until after the 25th, when reports are due back to the SotS, and would require a *lot* of local interest to pursue. If you do have this kind of interest, please indicate that here. I've added a poll.
In any case, please do participate if you can: there are a great many towns beginning with the letter S that are crying out for your attention. Link here - l/p = dkos.spreadsheet / metajesus
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UPDATE 2: 505 pm EST
Several people mentioned fear of vandalism by leaving the spreadsheet account public -- so the dkos.spreadsheed address will be read-only until the Town Clerk offices open in the morning. Thanks to AJE, theantirove, John C, Sharon L, and the un-named contributors for helping with the calls.