How many signatures does it take to put a question on the ballot by initiative? The anti-rail initiative petition and rival claims about what the law says have caused a lot of confusion.

Yesterday I quoted section 3-402 of the Honolulu City Charter, which seems to clearly set the threshold at 10 percent of voters registered in the last mayoral election.

A subsequent comment cited a different provision (section 3-404) which lays out a series of scenarios requiring as few as 10 percent of votes cast in the last regular mayoral election.

These contrasting provisions appear to be the basis for Stop Rail Now’s claim that they only had to collect about 30,000 valid signatures rather than the 44,000+ demanded by the City Clerk.

How to make sense of the apparent contradiction? Here’s how it looks to me.

It’s important to look at the two sections together and in context.

Section 3-402 comes first and spells out the requirement for a valid petition (10 % of total registered voters).

Section 3-404 appears to address the separate and subsidiary issue of when a proposed ordinance will be put to the voters once a valid petition with 10 % of registered voters is filed.

The lower thresholds appearing in this latter section, based on those casting votes rather than registered voters, appear to only be relevant to when the issue will be presented to voters and not to the issue of whether the petition is valid.

When understood in this way, the two sections are no longer in conflict.

Bottom line: The City Clerk was correct in requiring Stop Rail Now to meet the higher signature requirement.

In my humble opinion, of course.

I’m mystified why the media reports “he said – she said” without citing the law itself.

On Saturday, both the Advertiser and Star-Bulletin quoted an attorney for Stop Rail Now concerning the issue, but never took the simple step of referencing the charter itself. It seems to me that this is a necessary step in reporting on the issue, but one that has been lacking.