how many signatures do we have at this time?
We won't have any kind of official count for at least several weeks. (That's because Dave hasn't yet created or carried out the counting process yet.)
All of the petitions are to be mailed to a central location in San Jose, where they will be counted, sorted by county, and prepared for submission to each county Registrar of Voters.
I would hope that the number is somewhere between twenty to thirty thousand. I know that the gun show in San Diego generated about 750 signatures and the gun show in San Jose about 460. I'll be making my second mailing myself in a couple of days.
I am less concerned by the actual number submitted so far, and more concerned with whether the submissions are coming from all the counties where we have volunteers. It takes time to visit these gun businesses and set them up with materials. It takes encouragement to get them to actually collect the signatures.
Keep in mind that we expect an exponential growth in numbers of signatures gathered. The rate at which signatures are being gathered on the last day of the drive will be the chief determiner of our success. We need to ramp up collection activities such that the rate of signature gathering in one hundred days is at the level of approximately 12 thousand per day. For a county like mine, with about half a million people, that would translate into about 200 signatures per day.
I should have turned the question around.
How many signatures have you gathered? Are you one of the 78 listed county volunteers? If not, and you would be willing to volunteer, contact Dave at rkba@sonic.net.
If your county has volunteers, contact them to offer help and to get copies of the petition. Get your family and friends to sign. Locate a nearby gun business and supply them with petitions. Find a friend who belongs to a gun organization and ask that friend to get the members to sign and also ask to have the members get their families and friends to sign.
The "product" we are attempting to produce is just a signature of a willing voter. The challenge is that we must do this simple task over half a million times. From each of these voters we require just half a minute of time. But that is an expenditure of many months of effort using a less than perfectly efficient process.