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Sorry, Globe: Dianne Wilkerson didn't qualify for the ballot with 3,000 signatures
By adamg on Thu, 06/19/2008 - 2:42pm
The Globe reports on state Sen. Dianne Wilkerson's desire to avoid another embarrassment like two years ago, when she, oops, forgot to file her nomination petitions on time. The paper writes:
This year, Wilkerson qualified for the primary ballot with a whopping 3,000 signatures, 10 times the amount she needed.
Not quite. As Linda Rodriguez at the South End News reports, Wilkerson actually only qualified with 428 signatures, just one more than her opponent, Sonia Chang-Diaz. This doesn't mean the remainder of her 3,000 signatures were bad, necessarily, just that elections officials stopped looking after a certain point.
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Comments
The Globe Needs to Print a Retraction
The Globe Needs to Print a Retraction
I'd comment on the Globe site but they don't allow comments on their stories.
Looking forward to see what happens in tomorrows paper.
Job for Jeffy
Clearly such an apology should be the job of Jeff Jacoby. As soon as he finishes explaining why endless population growth is great in his two-parter, he can move on to why 86% fake signatures on a petition is good.
Are they fake, though?
Sorry if I wasn't clear: I don't know that most of the signatures were fake, because it could be that elections officials only stopped counting once they reached 428. I mean, they could be, but, oh, this is one of those times where I wish I could be a reporter and spend the time to find out (well, a reporter covering stuff like this, that is). My post (and the South End News post) was a comment on how the Globe basically got confused and doesn't seem to know the difference between "submitted" and "qualified."
Still, why 3K?
Well then, with that clarification, we have worthy questions. Are they real? If so, does this mean Wilkerson has a good organization for this go? Alternately, is she still stinging so badly from her last no-sig fiasco that she cajoled or paid folk to get those damned signatures to show her sincerity, as she claimed?
Of course, if a substantial number are fake, that's another story and angle, one more in line with her reputation. Surely she wouldn't be so sloppy after all her self-inflicted troubles over the past decade. (...or maybe...)
I'd love to see some positions from her, a campaign site, some debates, even some comments on Chang-Diaz' candidacy.
Her odd campaign site
Naturally, I Googled "Dianne Wilkerson" and found www.diannewilkerson.com/home.html, which appears to be a campaign site - circa 2006.
But then, being a Web geek, I backspaced over home.html and got to www.diannewilkerson.com, which is the Web site of a white real-estate broker in Texas! Very odd. Looks like our Dianne borrowed space on Texas Dianne's site for her pages (because all of the links on our Dianne's home page bring you to campaign-ish pages).
Compare to Chang-Diaz's site, which recognizes it is now 2008 and which does not appear to be sharing space with real-estate brokers in other states.
cyber squat
that is hilarious.
I can only imagine how the campaign site came to be.
"Yes hi, can I have some of your website?"
official information on certifying signatures
from A Candidate’s Guide to the 2008 State Election at Secretary of State Galvin's website:
"Candidates should collect more signatures than required because many may be disallowed either in the certification process or through challenges. Registrars are required by law to certify two-fifths more than the number of signatures required."
A candidate for State Senator needs only 300 signatures. So the registrar need not certify more than 420.
And you were wrong about that ...
Sorry, but the Globe does not say 3,000 signatures were qualified. It says:
"This year, Wilkerson qualified for the primary ballot with a whopping 3,000 signatures, 10 times the amount she needed."
The word "qualified" applies to primary not to signatures.
At worst that's mildly sloppy wording. It's certainly not incorrect, which is more than can be said for you and the South End News.
wording
Can't the Globe just get the wording right? "She qualified for the ballot after submitting 3000 signatures."
I agree your wording is more
I agree your wording is more precise, but I don't think the Globe is writing for election lawyers or overly pedantic bloggers. I noticed you didn't change the use of the word "qualified," thus basically proving the point that the original post misinterpreted what was written.
Say what?
Sorry, I don't get it. The Globe reported she submitted 3,000 signatures. You snidely imply that's not true, but provide no evidence.
Sure, the Secretary of State's office stopped certifying signatures at 428. Why should they go on when Wilkerson was already comfortably past the 300 the law requires?
That doesn't mean the Globe was wrong. It wrote about how many signatures Wilkerson collected, which, frankly, is far more interesting and newsworthy than the entirely arbitrary number the Secretary of State bothered to certify. Just ask Jim Oganowski. Ask Wilkerson herself.
The South End News even grudgingly admitted the Globe was correct, though its oddly written and quite pointless story went on to make a big deal about the fact that Wilkerson had "only" one more certified signature than her challenger. Apparently the South End News believes the number of signatures the Secretary of State decides to certify above and beyond what's required by law is relevant. Maybe they think it's predictive, like tea leaves or the shadow cast by groundhogs.
I'm sorry, dude, you need to do better than this post or your Mindless Globe Hater credentials will be revoked.
Wrong. The Globe says this:
Wrong. The Globe says this: "This year, Wilkerson qualified for the primary ballot with a whopping 3,000 signatures, 10 times the amount she needed."
Wilkerson did not qualify with 3,000 signtures, she submitted 3000.
Sorry, dude, you're wrong.
Sorry, dude, you're wrong. Read what they wrote, not what you want to believe they wrote -- "qualified for the ballot" is not the same thing as "qualified signatures."
English is not your native
English is not your native language?
I'm not just a member of the Mindless Globe Hater club ...
It's really an issue of poor wording. The Globe says "Wilkerson qualified for the primary ballot with a whopping 3,000 signatures." Technically, she didn't qualify for the ballot with 3,000 signatures (whopping or otherwise) because election officials stopped counting at 428 (thanks for looking that up, Ron). Michael Pahre should've written my post, because he put it a lot more simply and elegantly - what the Globe should have written was:
So, no, this is not on the order of writing the MBTA has to tear down a three-year-old bridge when the bridge is actually 100 years old, but an example of how, at least for the more obsessive among us (especially those who grew up watching stuff like signature certifications with their elections-law lawyer fathers), language matters.
Sorry, but Jeffrey Hale is right
Sorry, but Jeffrey Hale is right. The Globe did not say she had 3,000 qualified signatures. It says she qualified for the ballot with 3,000 signatures. That's not the same thing.
Torturing the grammar
The fact that you can read it both ways indicates that it was written incorrectly. The whole point of news media is to report something factually and in a clear manner.
You can easily parse the grammar both of the ways indicated by Jeff and Adam. That makes their choice of words incorrect as far as its use in a paper should go. It is the editor's job to choose language that is exacting and unambiguous.
"She is qualified for the ballot after submitting 3000 signatures, 10 times more than were necessary. Officials stopped validating her signatures after 482 of them had satisfied their requirements." is better than "She qualified for the ballot with 3000 signatures".
Torturing the logic
In the science of reading comprehension what Adam did is called "over parsing," and it's the fault of the reader, not the writer. He assumed facts not in evidence. That's not an indication that the story was written incorrectly, it's an indication that it was READ incorrectly.
Kaz, you choose to blame the Globe if readers randomly (and history would say with malice of forethought) switch the words to which modifiers are attached. I choose to blame the readers because I think that's intellecutally dishonest.
Let's not forget that what started this was Adam's assertion the Globe was wrong in saying Wilkerson had submitted 3,000 signatures. To be precise, he said "Sorry, Globe: Dianne Wilkerson didn't qualify for the ballot with 3,000 signatures." After much blather it's come down to this: the Globe was right. The best the Mindless Globe Haters (thanks, persius, I kind of like that phrase -- it's so appropriate) have been able to come up with is a lame-ass excuse that if you torture the English language enough, the moon is full, and Mars is in retrograde, you could read the sentence two ways. And even then, wink wink, we know what they meant.
BABMNHTSYS
Blue Mass Group
Blue Mass Group, which should know better, posted a story titled "Only 14% of Dianne Wilkerson's signatures were valid". I posted a comment over there directing people here.
Thanks, Ron
You're right. They should know better. Citizen journalism at its finest.
It's common practice for
It's common practice for politicians to submit far more signatures than will ever be certified. They will certify up to the number necessary then a percentage beyond. It's a show of power and support.This is really semantics here with what the Globe said.
Globe issues correction for another part of the story
Not on the Globe online correction page yet, so here it is, typed in by hand:
What the paper originally had Wilkerson saying:
Well, that makes less sense
Good to see that was corrected.
Actually, the thing she
Actually, the thing she didn't say makes much more sense. I knew when I read that she had said something about needing a car to work out in the wilderness that it didn't sound like her. One time when I called her CLUELESS staff about forward-funding for the T, they told me that her constituents in some weird W town out in the burbs didn't care about the T--and I wondered why in the hell this idiot thought she had constituents out there. Maybe he meant in a more global sense--like her constituents in the "World Community"--but that doesn't really make sense.
If you don't have a CORI
So... she's looking out for the criminal-American community? I guess she does have a peculiar constituency.
A chicken in every pot, and a stolen car in every garage!
Doesn't that depend on where the casino is located?
If we ever do get casinos, one of them might be at Suffolk Downs or Wonderland -- both easily reachable without a car.
(This does not mean I'm in favor of casinos. I'm not.)
Except ...
She was talking about CORI, not cari (sorry) - and her issue there is basically that once you have a criminal record, you always have a criminal record, even if it's for something minor and it was years ago, which will rule out a number of her consitutents for jobs at casinos, I guess. She wants to seal criminal records after a period of time. See this Banner story. You can't expect the Globe to add another sentence of explanation to a correction, now can you?
How about
How about some jobs that my criminal constituents can work at, huh? Don't give me this casino nonsense. What we need is more car washes.
I kinda can't get over 'but that requires you not to be a criminal' as an objection.
Forgot???
"forgot to file her nomination petitions on time" LOL, she needs to fire some campaign workers or hire an assistant :)