Oops! Turns out the recent initiative to gut the Portland Clean Energy Fund in order to create a huge slush fund for Portland’s Police was absolutely full of invalid signatures. Which is, of course, a surprise to nobody. From the Portland Auditor’s Office:
The primary reason the petition failed to qualify was the low number of signatures from registered Portland voters. Only 61 percent of signatures in statistical samples were valid. In the combined samples, over 70 percent of rejected signatures were from signers who were not registered voters or did not live in Portland.
A secondary reason was the high number of instances where the same person signed the petition two or more times. When a statistical sample includes duplicate, triplicate, and multiple signatures, the state-law formula requires elections officials to reduce the final signature tally proportionally. Duplicates and triplicates found in the samples of 1PDX2026 lowered the petition’s overall validity rate by 3.57 percent, removing 1,994 signatures from the result of the statistical sample.
The full press release goes into more detail.
Police union president Aaron Schmautz is fuming. Clearly he’s unfamiliar with the concept that employees of our city should diligently do their prescribed duties:
On behalf of disenfranchised Portland voters, we intend to file legal action challenging this decision and process. We are not seeking a guaranteed court outcome for the initiative, just a fair, accurate and transparent process. Portlanders must have a voice in the direction of our city.
See his full post on Facebook.
But when so many of the signatures aren’t even Portlanders it’s quite rich to say we don’t have a voice. In the meantime we’ll waste money dealing with this matter. All while we’re still waiting on measure 26-217, which created new mechanisms for police oversight, to go into effect amidst efforts to block it by the police union. Voters approved it in 2020 with 82% for.
It seems Portland’s police have very selective hearing when it concerns the voice of Portlanders.