Following the announcement last week that the CUSD recall effort failed, many people asked what happened. Something is wrong when 35 percent of signatures are disqualified on any kind of petition.

The total of 177,000 recall signatures was divided among seven trustees, averaging 25,285 signatures per trustee. The number was roughly 24 percent more than needed. The registrar of voters first performed a sampling to determine if enough valid signatures had been gathered. Only one trustee, Crystal Kochendorfer, didn’t have enough recall signatures against her to justify a full count. For the other six trustees, the sampling found the validity rate within the range of 90 percent to 110 percent. Even if the validity fell to 90 percent, the required minimum of 20,400 verified signatures would have been reached (90 percent of 25,285 = 22,756). How, then, did the number of disqualified signatures jump to 35 percent? The discrepancy is considerable, and the registrar of voters needs to explain what took place during the verification process.

As another questionable matter, Marlene Draper was quoted in The Register as saying the cost of verifying all signatures was $521,801 (for the remaining 155,000 or so after taking out Kochendorfer’s petition). How is that possible when the office had only 30 days to do the work? Even if 100 “extra” (temporary) employees worked eight hours a day for 30 days, the cost is unreasonable at approximately $3.36 per signature. Finding a voter’s address in a database isn’t rocket science, and comparing the signature on the petition to the signature on record doesn’t require extraordinary skill.

Those gathering signatures asked each person about voter registration. Some of the recall group volunteers were spot-checking signatures against voter registration records, and the disqualification rate was well within the range found in the initial sampling. At the very least, the registrar of voters needs to shed light on what took place during the verification process.