Fresh 2026 data shows campaigns submitting far more signatures than the law requires, while the share that actually counts has barely moved. Here's what that gap means for planning a drive.
Ballotpedia's review of the 53 citizen-initiated measures certified for the 2026 ballot across 15 states found something that looks contradictory at first: campaigns are collecting a lot more signatures than the law requires, and the share of those signatures that actually survives verification has barely changed in a decade. The average 2026 campaign submitted 162.66% of its required signature count — roughly 63% more than the legal minimum — up from a 2017–2026 average of 144.1%. The average validity rate across those same measures was 77.96%, just off the ten-year average of 78.8%. Campaigns are not getting better at avoiding invalid signatures. They are getting better at planning around the fact that they never will.
A signature's validity rate is simply the number of signatures a state counts as valid divided by the raw number submitted. It is not a grading of how careful a petition drive was; it reflects a mix of factors that are mostly outside any single circulator's control — a signer who moved, an address that no longer matches the voter file, a duplicate across pages, a county that interprets a matching requirement strictly. This site's guide to why signatures get struck covers the mechanics in more depth; the point here is simpler: an experienced drive does not try to drive that rate to 100%. It tries to know, in advance, roughly where that rate will land, and collects enough raw signatures that the valid remainder still clears the requirement with room to spare.
That is the real story in the 2026 numbers. The requirement side of the math ranged enormously — from Alaska Ballot Measure 1's 26,705 valid signatures needed, to the 874,641 signatures required for each of five separate constitutional amendments on California's ballot this cycle. At that California scale, the margin for error compounds fast: the measure that drew the most signatures nationally, Protect Retirement & Life Savings (Proposition 42), submitted 1,638,055 raw signatures and had 1,044,143 come back valid — a validity rate near 64%, well under the national average, which is typical of what happens when a petition effort runs at enormous scale across a state as large and procedurally varied as California. A drive that size cannot assume the 78% average will hold; it has to plan for its own number running lower, and the submission total reflects that.
Not every campaign is padding by the national average of roughly 63%. In Oregon, where this site's Oregon ballot access guide covers the state's referendum process, the campaign behind No Tax Oregon submitted 250,949 raw signatures against a 78,116 requirement for Oregon Referendum 120 — more than triple what the law demanded. A cushion that large usually isn't about distrust of the signatures already in hand. It is a response to a specific, structural risk: a filing deadline that leaves no time for a second collection push if the first round comes in short, a cure period too narrow to meaningfully top off a shortfall, or an expectation that the measure will draw a signature-by-signature legal challenge and needs more room than the bare requirement provides. The size of a campaign's cushion is really a bet on how much its specific state, timeline, and opposition environment can afford to be wrong.
The practical consequence for anyone planning a drive is that the legal signature requirement is not the number to budget against. The number to budget against is the requirement divided by a realistic validity assumption for that state and measure type — and then padded further for deadline risk. This site's breakdown of what signature gathering costs walks through the budget drivers in more detail; the validity assumption is simply one more input that belongs in that math from day one, not something discovered after a batch comes back from the county. A campaign that only budgets to the bare legal minimum is implicitly betting on a 100% validity rate that has never once happened at scale.
This is also one of the more useful questions to put to a prospective signature gathering vendor during the hiring conversation: what validity rate has their work actually produced, state by state, and how much cushion do they build in before a submission deadline rather than after one. A firm that can answer that with real numbers, rather than a guess, is one that has planned for the roughly 22% loss instead of being surprised by it. The same discipline applies to ballot access work generally — the states and the deadlines change, but the gap between what gets collected and what gets counted never fully closes.
The timing piece matters as much as the math. Ballotpedia's decade of data (240 certified initiatives since 2017) shows the validity rate itself barely moving year to year, which means the loss a campaign should expect is largely knowable in advance — it is not a surprise waiting at the county clerk's office. What has shifted is how much runway campaigns leave themselves to react if that predictable loss turns out to run slightly worse than planned on a given drive. A cushion collected three weeks before a filing deadline still leaves time to send circulators back out to a few more neighborhoods if a spot-check suggests trouble. The same cushion collected the day before a deadline is just a number on a submission receipt; there is no path left to add to it. Planning the cushion and planning the calendar are really the same exercise, not two separate ones.
Across the 53 initiatives Ballotpedia tracked for the 2026 ballot, the average validity rate was 77.96%, close to the 2017–2026 average of 78.8%. A rate in that general range is typical for a well-run drive; very large, high-volume efforts sometimes see a lower rate simply because of the scale and procedural variety involved.
The 2026 national average was about 63% more signatures than the legal minimum (162.66% of the requirement). The right cushion for a specific campaign depends on the state's expected validity rate, how much time remains to collect more if a first round falls short, and the cure period available after submission.
Filing deadlines that leave no room for a second collection push, narrow cure periods, and an expectation of a legal challenge to the petition all push campaigns to submit well beyond the average cushion. Oregon's No Tax Oregon referendum effort, for example, submitted over three times its required signature count.
Not automatically, but very large efforts covering broad, procedurally varied areas — like a statewide California constitutional amendment — tend to see validity rates below the national average, simply because of the volume and variety of petition pages involved.
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