Change-of-Government Petition Information

7/29/10 at 2:30 pm: The final official count of verified names is 10,815. The Circuit Court again has custody of the petition pages.

The Office of Voter Registration has been processing a petition for a referendum before the voters asking whether Arlington should change from the current County Manager Plan form of government structure to a County Board Form as described in § 15.2 of the Code of Virginia. 

The petitions were filed with the Clerk of the Court on July 14, 2010, and we began processing them on July 15. A total of 758 (corrected from 761 previously reported) petition sheets with more than 16,000 signatures were submitted. The number of signatures needed for the question to qualify for the ballot is 14,350.

By July 26 we had verified 13,032 names after reviewing each page a minimum of three times. On July 28, however, it was revealed that the circulator of 123 of the accepted pages was not qualified to serve in that capacity, as a circulator must be eligible to register and vote for the question. Those pages were subsequently disqualified, and the previously-counted names removed from the totals.

Referendum Petition FAQ

Petition Process Information

Completed Petition Pages

The links below take you to public inspection copies of the processed petition pages. Please note: The pages are double-sided, legal-sized sheets. Each page has a control number, with the A side being the first side and the B side being the reverse.

Each batch includes 10 finished petition pages (total of 20 individual pages, since they are two-sided). These are likely to be fairly large files. Also, some of the pages appear upside down because that's the way the original petition pages were copied (head-to-toe). Our scanner reproduces them as they are.

Petition code key

R = Registered (voter was registered to vote in Arlington at time of signing petition and at time we validated name). These are the names actually counted towards the required total.

NR = No registration record for voter. Sometimes we might note if the voter is registered in another Virginia city or county.

RNQ = Voter is registered but not qualified. Typically used if a voter registered to vote after he or she signed the petition.

NQ = The voter is not qualified because the address provided is not in Arlington.

I = The voter's status is inactive on our rolls, meaning the voter has not responded to a request from us to confirm his residence address.

DUP = When checking this name, we found we had already counted it for the petition, meaning the voter signed the petition more than once. We can only count each voter one time.

CI = Can't Identify, meaning there is not enough information for us to identify the person who signed, or the information provided is illegible. We also use this code if there is more than one voter registered by the same name but none at the address listed on the petition, and we can't identify which voter signed from the signature.

Caveat: The "completed pages" in the above batches aren't necessarily final; they just mean we've been through each page twice to assess the record status. We will review them once more before the process is complete. Any changed pages are posted separately as adjustments (see below). 

Notes: We've had a few questions about Page 282 in Batch 48 because it appears there is no circulator information, even though it is notarized. The circulator information, signed by John Antonelli, is present on the page but doesn't appear on black-and-white copies because he used an orange fluorescent marker. On Page 558 in Batch 69 he had several voters sign using the same marker, so they are also not readable on the copies.

Batch 76 is a separate batch where signers only signed on the second page of the sheet. There is no requirement that signers must start with the first page, so we decided to count these pages.

Adjusted Pages

Below are batches, also of 10 pages each, of pages where we have made adjustments to the annotations as previously scanned. These are the names we've subsequently been able to identify during the final phase of processing. The original annotation for these adjusted names has been struck through on the pages and the new annotation entered and circled.

Disqualified Pages

Page 120 This page, originally included in Batch2, was subsequently disqualified when we realized none of the signers provided the date signed. It is thus impossible to determine when this page was circulated and subsequently whether the signers were qualified voters at the time. We had originally accepted their names, but have since removed these seven names from the accepted count.

Page 487 This page was also disqualified because none of the voters provided a date signed.

Page 315 This page, originally included in Batch 55, has been disqualified because the date the voters signed is after the date the notary witnessed the circulator's signature. The two names previously counted on this page have been removed from the count.

Page numbers disqualified on July 28: These pages, as originally accepted, can be found in their accepted state in the batches above.

Note: The three pages previously-disqualified for other reasons were also circulated by the same individual.

List of Validated Signatures

The link below presents a list of voters verified from the referendum petition. Please note that the names may not accurately match the annotations on the actual petition pages, mainly because of the 123 pages initially counted but subsequently disqualified. In removing the names marked as "R" on those pages, there were a number we simply couldn't find. Also names removed from the disqualified pages may have been marked as duplicates on some of the accepted pages. The discrepancy is not material because the petition fell short on verified names prior to the disqualification.

Note that this list is a 401-page pdf file. Names are listed in alphabetical order.

Validated Signature List