Group angry at registrar

After failing to get a city spending initiative qualified for the November ballot, a Newport Beach residents group is saying that Orange County election officials went out of their way to invalidate signatures the group collected.

Newporters for Responsible Government had proposed a ballot measure to require a public vote on most city borrowing for public projects. The Orange County Registrar of Voters last week announced the group fell 186 signatures short of the 6,006 signatures they needed to get on the November ballot.

Newporters spokesman John Buttolph on Friday said the registrar had made it “cumbersome” to review the signature validation process, and he doesn’t believe 798 of the 7,411 signatures submitted were duplicates, as the registrar reported.

“I’m suspicious that more than one in 10 of the people who signed this petition didn’t know they’d already signed it,” Buttolph said.

Registrar of Voters Neal Kelley dismissed Buttolph’s complaint as unfounded. He said his office followed election law in its procedures and the information it disclosed to Buttolph, and every signature that was questionable was checked by three separate groups of election workers.

“The law is very clear. You can’t sign it more than once,” he said. “We had people that signed twice, three times, and some even more than that.”

Buttolph said he is still reviewing the information and has not decided whether to challenge the registrar’s determination in court.