* All emphasis added. From a June 5, 2014 Chicago Tribune editorial…

State election officials say the campaign to change how Illinois draws its legislative maps came up way short of the signatures needed to get its measure on the November ballot. Yes for Independent Maps says it can prove otherwise.

It’s a steep hill to climb. Why is the State Board of Elections determined to block the path?

Could it be because this is a campaign to take power from the politicians and give it to the people? […]

The campaign challenged the review, saying it was hurried and uneven. Some examiners were quick to discard signatures that weren’t clear matches, they said; some were less picky. Individual examiners’ invalidation rates ranged from 17 percent to 86 percent.

* From a June 17, 2014 Tribune editorial, “Illinois elections board is rushing to kill a people power amendment”…

Elections board employees examined a random sample of 5 percent of the signatures and announced that only 46 percent of them were valid. If accurate, that projects — projects — to the campaign being short of the 298,400 valid signatures needed to qualify for the ballot.

But the organizers say their own checks show a much higher validation rate.

Should we take the word of the elections board examiners as gospel? One examiner disqualified 86 percent of the signatures he or she checked. Another examiner disqualified only 17 percent.

* From a June 19, 2014 Tribune editorial…

Why are you so sure the fault lies with the people across Illinois who collected the signatures and not the people in your agency who counted them?

Individual state examiners’ results were all over the map. One threw out 86 percent of the signatures he or she checked; another threw out a mere 16 percent. Isn’t this a red flag?

* As I explained to subscribers yesterday, this is clearly not a “red flag.” And any sane, rational person without a not so hidden agenda would easily understand this.

If you click here and download the spreadsheet provided to media outlets, including the Tribune, you’ll see a very easy explanation for those two examples that the Tribune keeps harping on.

Examiners looked at 25,000 petition entries, selected at random via computer. They struck 13,807 as invalid, for a failure rate of 55 percent.

* If you can’t download the spreadsheet, here are the numbers. The first column is the examiner number, the second is the total number of petition entries examined by each examiner, the third column is the total valid petition entries by that examiner and the fourth is total invalid entries found by each examiner…

Examiner 1 1714 738 976
Examiner 2 1358 644 714
Examiner 3 1358 757 601
Examiner 4 1283 557 726
Examiner 5 1220 475 745
Examiner 6 1184 527 657
Examiner 7 1084 466 618
Examiner 8 980 350 630
Examiner 9 979 380 599
Examiner 10 960 439 521
Examiner 11 923 371 552
Examiner 12 920 291 629
Examiner 13 920 414 506
Examiner 14 895 357 538
Examiner 15 867 403 464
Examiner 16 757 468 289
Examiner 17 730 355 375
Examiner 18 721 363 358
Examiner 19 701 366 335
Examiner 20 637 292 345
Examiner 21 596 305 291
Examiner 22 577 230 347
Examiner 23 568 227 341
Examiner 24 557 315 242
Examiner 25 528 273 255
Examiner 26 405 205 200
Examiner 27 354 272 82
Examiner 28 301 117 184
Examiner 29 219 139 80
Examiner 30 217 67 150
Examiner 31 183 26 157
Examiner 32 154 82 72
Examiner 33 132 75 57
Examiner 34 105 47 58
Examiner 35 104 64 40
Examiner 36 92 76 16
Examiner 37 91 35 56
Examiner 38 1 0 1

Toss out Examiner 38 because s/he only looked at one petition entry. You get an average of 676 entries examined and a median of 711.

* Now, onto the Trib’s goofiness. The Board of Elections staffer who “disqualified only 17 percent” (or 16 percent, depending on which day you read the Trib) examined just 92 petition entries. The staffer who “disqualified 86 percent” looked at just 183 entries. Both of those people looked at far, far less petition entries than the average or median.

Statistics seems like a difficult topic, but let’s put it in a political way to make it easy to understand in our world. If you have 37 people making phone calls for a poll, would you publish only the results from two workers who made 0.7 percent and 0.4 percent of the total phone calls?

Of course you wouldn’t. What matters is the overall number, not cherry-picked results from a couple of people who looked at a tiny amount of petition entries.

Those two examiners darkly singled out by the Tribune were the most serious deviations, but deviations are naturally expected among all examiners, particularly considering they weren’t just matching up signatures, but also looking to see if people were registered to vote (subscribers know more about that and I’ll get into it in due time here).

Different randomly selected stacks are just gonna have different results. Plain and simple. Not all circulators were equal. Not all regions covered were equally managed (and some regions were checked in bunches on certain days). Not all signers were honest. You’re just naturally gonna see differences when looking at any individual samples, and particularly so when you single out some of the tiniest samples.

And, heck, even if there is a real problem with those two, toss them out and the remap folks are still a very, very long way from making it onto the ballot.

* The bottom line here is that the Tribune, out of either ignorance or malice, has repeatedly used an easily disprovable statistic to claim that the Illinois State Board of Elections has corruptly stacked the deck against the remap reformers. It needs to stop.

*** UPDATE *** OneMan in comments…

Doing some quick math in the spreadsheet and eliminating any examiner above #30 due to their small sample size, one sort of interesting thing comes up…

I show a average failure rate of 53.38% roughly with a standard deviation of 9.5% so using a normal distribution.

+2 Stddevs is 72.24% -2 stddevs is 34%

We have one examiner who fails below -2STDEV but none that are +2 Over…

So all in all it seems to pass statistical muster, a touch over half are over the average failure rate.

If a was the pro folks I would take a look at Examiner 12 a touch and see if I could get examiner 30 to be cloned, but all in, it is statistically clean.