I made a comment to this effect at Loaded, and I'll repeat it here: it's premature to say he will be on the ballot. The campaign has gathered just enough signatures to make the ballot, but some percentage of those will be ruled ineligible. With a month to go, the campaign has reason to feel confident, but they ain't there yet.

A quick correction if I may.

We're not reporting that Westlund WILL BE on the ballot. We're reporting that the Westlund campaign has met their initial goal of getting 18,360 signatures. They will need to keep working to overcome the number of sigs that will be tossed out by the Secretary of State for various reasons.

Its my estimation that they will get on the ballot given the number of sigs they've been able to gather since Democracy Resources shifted to gathering their sigs and away from ballot initiatives.

Right. But Westlund is saying that he WILL BE on the ballot - and they're now on the home stretch. No surprise. We always knew it would be a relatively easy thing to get 18,000 signatures - especially with such a low turnout primary.

Ditto to Carla. It's anyone's guess what the failure rate will be on those signatures, given the invalidity of sigs from partisan primary voters--something initiatives don't have to worry about.

Will they make their 30,000? Unless there was something unusual about their abilities the past 10 days (when they collected about 12,000 of their current total), you have to think the answer is yes.

The question is, how many will they need? If they can keep their failure rate below 40%, 30,000 should be enough. But one has to expect that their rate will be as low as (or worse) than the worst performers in the initiative gatherings, which in the early turn in averaged about 35% failure. It could be close.

To sum: will they make their goal? Most likely. Will it get them on the ballot? Unknown.

Tip Credit:

I heard the rumor on the ORA funding Westlund's signatures. I also heard the same thing about the Grand Rhonde Tribe.

I spent quite a good measure of time this week tracking down both of those rumors and I can find nothing to substantiate either of them. If you've got something that does, I'd really love to see it. Please feel free to drop me an email.

Tip Credit:

I heard the rumor on the ORA funding Westlund's signatures. I also heard the same thing about the Grand Rhonde Tribe.

I spent quite a good measure of time this week tracking down both of those rumors and I can find nothing to substantiate either of them. If you've got something that does, I'd really love to see it. Please feel free to drop me an email.

David, I don't believe that was the part of the post that was being questioned. The question is whether Grande Ronde and ORA are financing Westlund's sig gathering. Seems possible, but just unlikely enough that I'm not going to believe it just because some anonymous poster on the Internet says it's so. Especially not on a board that's been so harsh on Westlund.

(I was told by a "reliable source" that the sigs were all gathered by the Anti-Irish Coalition, pass it on...)

Buckman -- Why would Democrats want Westlund off the ballot? With two Republicans in the race (plus Mary Starrett), the right side of the ballot splits all over the place.

Sure, some early polling showed Ben pulling votes from Ted, but his name ID is still nowhere. Voters are going to figure out real fast that Ben might have changed his voter reg form, but he's still got Republican values. Maybe moderate Republican values, but still more elephant than donkey.

I have to think internally, Westlund's campaign is shooting for 30,000 signatures minimum. That's just a guess of course. If they certified 60% that would get them there.

Maybe torridjoe is right, with the law the way it is, he could be facing a much lower rate closer to 40-50%. That means he'd need 36,000-45,000.

I think the Westlund camp is premature in their celebration...

David, Stacey's told me long ago 30K was their nut to make, in their minds. So you're absolutely right that they're looking for 60% or better.

As long as I'd paid DR all that money, I agree with you that they need to double what they have to feel safe.

Kari--Is it really just you and me who thinks the way you discuss? Ted gets the entire left half (minus Green) and into the center. On the other side you have the usual fringe suspects, plus Starrett. That pushes Ron leftward from the jump, but he always intended to run on his Portland cred anyway. Except now here he is moving to the left, and all of a sudden he bumps into Westlund camping out on the border. Dude's boxed in!

By the same turn, however, the mere fact that Saxton is competing for what Westlund has to consider his base--right center--immensely complicates his positioning. On pure partisan number crunching, he has no real shot and contributes only to elevating Ted. Westlund's people are hoping he can shatter the entire ideological frame of the race and make it about personality. Been done, but it's a tall order.

So taking the odds and betting he can't do it, I repeat: On pure partisan number crunching, he has no real shot and contributes only to elevating Ted. Not Ron, Ted.

IMO :)

Actually Progvoice. AFSCME (A union and pretty politically active if I don't say so myself) supported voter-own-elections. In fact we supported two candidates that used the system legally Fritz and Sten.

we still have the bipolar "elephant or donkey" in our politics?

Yes. Or, is there some other kind of framework that makes sense to you? Even Westlund is operating within the blue/red framework - he's just trying to split the difference and call himself purple. He's wrong, and it won't work, but there's not some other kind of framework.

The only place where you'll see THREE separate ideological positions is in urban growth (metro) politics. There, you have the pave-the-earth folks (sprawl is good! density is bad! no ugb!), the smart growth people (sprawl is bad! density is good! save the ugb!), and the no-growthers (sprawl bad! density bad! we have no basic math skills!)