Initiative 59 Campaign
409 H Street NW
Washington, DC 20002
547-9404

July 7, 1998

Director
District of Columbia Board of Elections and Ethics
441 4th Street NW Rm. 270
Washington, DC 20001

Dear Director,

In order to verify the signatures collected on the Initiative 59 petitions, last January we purchased a copy of the District of Columbia voters registration list on a half inch computer tape.

The first problem we encountered with this database was having it converted to a usable format. As you may know computers capable of processing half inch tape are largely obsolete. Locating a mainframe machine to convert the Board of Elections and Ethics' tape into a usable format was both time consuming and expensive. In these times of readily available, inexpensive data processing technology, it seems almost a disservice for the BoE&E not to provide the voters registration lists in a PC compatible format, such as 3.5 discs or CD-ROM.

Next, we discovered that when purchased in January the BoE&E data was already outdated. This seems apparent as the names of at least four people -- who showed us voter registration cards indicating they had been registered since last fall -- did not appear on the database we obtained in the end of January.

Considering that we have collected well over 31,000 signatures, and that nearly 10% of those were names of unmistakably registered voters, but showed an address different than that which appeared on the BoE&E list, we can't help but wonder what percentage of the many names at the wrong address might be due to the speed, or lack thereof, at which the BoE&E has been updating the voter roles to reflect additions and changes of address.

Furthermore, we also noticed that the BoE&E database contained numerous data entry errors.

Although our independent verification of the signatures collected on Initiative 59 -- based on the BoE&E database --indicates that we have far more valid signatures than necessary to qualify the measure for the November election; based on the inaccuracies in the BoE&E database we have some question as to how our independent verification will tally against whatever database the BoE&E uses to verify the signatures. This is particularly problematic because our deadline for submitting signatures on this initiative is August 10, 1998, which would provide ample time to amass enough additional signatures. However, submitting the petition on July 6th, in order to qualify for the November ballot, raises a concern that, due to the problematic nature of the BoE&E supplied database, our calculations of valid signatures might be off.

Understandably, we feel, it would be grossly unfair if submitting our petition a month before our deadline expires we fail to qualify owing to the sorry shape of the BoE&E database.

Sincerely,

Wayne Turner
Initiative 59 Proposer