Rick Claussen, the consultant and initiative expert who has been brought in to help qualify the current redistricting initiative in California, got in touch this week. Claussen, who works from the Sacramento suburbs, is one of the grown-ups in the direct democracy business and has one of its strongest records, particularly in winning "yes" campaigns, which are much more difficult than "no" campaigns. He worked on previous Schwarzenegger ballot campaigns in 2004 and 2005, and he expressed confidence by email that the redistricting measure will qualify in time for the November ballot.

Claussen says the initiative is on track to hit its target of 1.1 million signatures the first week of May; signatures will be submitted the week of May 12. That number of signatures is nearly twice the 694,354 legally required to make the ballot. But in the initiative business, it is standard operating procedure to submit hundreds of thousands more signatures than legally required -- in large part to speed up the qualification process. When more signatures than required are submitted, county elections officials -- who do the counting in California -- can count using "random sampling" techniques, rather than by going through every signature. If the random sample shows that the number of valid signatures is greater than 110 percent of the legally required number (and a validity rate of 70 percent is considered good in this business), then the initiative automatically qualifies for the ballot. This makes things much faster.

The California Secretary of State has set a deadline of June 26 for measures to qualify for the ballot. Claussen writes: "As you know there is not a hard and fast rule, but I don't see any problem making it for November on a random sample if they are submitted by May 15. I can't recall a situation where a measure failed to qualify in the amount of time we still have remaining on a random sample."

The price increase per signature from $2 to $2.25 is not a big deal, according to Claussen. In other campaigns, last-minute price increases have gone to $3 or $4. But there is concern that with so many measures needing signatures around the country, California circulators could be lured to petitions in other states.