No surprise: Some of the elections turned in to pass Referendum 71, which would put Washington State's "everything but marriage" law to a ballot vote, are turning out to be fraudulent. But will it be enough to invalidate the Gary Randal and Larry Stickney's effort and leave the law intact? Too early to tell, but so far their error rate is too high.

Secretary of State spokesman Dave Ammons (emphasis ours): "Overall, 23,457 signatures have been processed, with a cumulative error rate of 13.31 percent. Sponsors need to get 120,577 of their signatures declared valid in order to secure a ballot spot. They turned in 137,689 signatures back on July 25. That is 14.2 percent above the bare minimum. With their 17,112 extra signatures, they could sustain an overall error rate of 12.42 percent."

UPDATE: Uh oh. Did we speak too soon?