OLYMPIA, Wash. - This is one of the busiest weeks of the year for the Washington Secretary of State's election division. Tens of thousands of petitions for ballot measures are scanned to make back-up copies, then a staff of 25 verifies the signatures. That means checking each name against a database of 3.5 million registered voters.

In most cases, if the number of signatures turned in far exceeds the requirement, a random sample can be used. However, confirming accuracy is still a challenge, according to Shane Hamlin, assistant state elections director.

"The hard part is actually finding them, because people don't always write legibly. It's hard to read their names, sometimes; they don't provide all of the information that makes it easy for us to find them. So that process - doing a sample check of about 10,000 signatures - takes three to four days."

Technology has helped speed up the verification, Hamlin says, but it can't replace the initiative process, and it takes a lot of work to get an idea all the way to the printed ballot.

"For a measure to get on the ballot, a lot of people either have made an informed decision to sign the petition or have just signed it to get past a signature-gatherer, so to speak, outside a store. But this is a constitutional right. This is a process that is protected in the Constitution. It's really kind of a grassroots, direct-democracy process."

Hamlin says plenty of people sign petitions even when they're not legally eligible to do so. The average error rate is 18 percent. He expects at least some ballot-measure backers to know if their initiatives made the cut by the end of this week. If a full verification is required instead of a random sample, the process takes several weeks.

The process is also detailed on the Secretary of State's website, www.sos.wa.gov.

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