We knew weeks ago it looked like the effort to change Arlington's government for the worse, backed by two public safety unions, the Arlington GOP & Arlington Greens, was on thin ice. Then when the group finally turned in its petitions last week, it was clear the push was likely to fall well short. Today, ArlNow.com is projecting the effort will fail:
Arlington County General Registrar Linda Lindberg says her staff has completed their second pass over about 700 petition pages. Since about 10,200 signatures were validated during the first pass, that means the second pass is, on average, validating 3.5 additional signatures per page. But with only 61 pages to go, it’s likely that the petition will only have about 12,900 valid signatures going into the third pass, which is expected to start Monday. “I’d be surprised if we pick up another 100″ signatures during the third pass, Lindberg said. With those 100 additional signatures, the petition will be more than 1,350 votes short. This spreadsheet shows just how improbable it would be for the petition to reach the magic 14,350 number from this point out.
Yikes. That's not falling just short — that makes you wonder if they only turned in the petitions to save face with their memberships for wasting tens of thousands of dollars on this quixotic effort. Would've been nice if those alleged fiscal stalwarts in the Arlington GOP had saved Arlington taxpayers the money on the dozens of hours of staff time to count the petitions though, don't you think?
Sign up for the Blue Virginia weekly newsletter
