He totally half-assed it, too.
Dave Wilson
Houston Community College trustee and longtime anti-gay activist Dave Wilson has submitted a city charter amendment petition seeking a November vote to bar men “who perceive or express themselves as women” from entering women’s restrooms, but it appears he misread state law and submitted about 300 fewer signatures than he needs to qualify for the ballot.
Wilson delivered 19,707 signatures to City Hall on Tuesday morning, but state law requires those seeking a city charter change to submit 20,000 signatures or signatures from 5 percent of qualified voters, whichever is smaller. Mayoral spokeswoman Janice Evans said the city wasn’t sure yet about the law surrounding Wilson’s petition but would offer an opinion this afternoon.
Wilson, standing beside his white pickup containing six boxes full of signatures, said he needs only 17,269 signatures — 10 percent of the votes cast in the last mayoral election, and the threshold for repealing an ordinance, not a charter change.
Wilson’s proposed charter revision is a pointed challenge to the city’s legally embattled equal rights ordinance, passed last May, that opponents perceive as allowing men dressed in drag to enter a women’s restroom.
“My whole point is, do you want your mother to be in a woman’s restroom and a man walk in on that?” Wilson said. “I don’t think so. That’s totally out of the question.”
My mother can take care of herself just fine, but that’s neither here nor there. Putting aside the fact that Wilson and his dirty-minded buddy Steven Hotze continue to lie through their teeth about this, let’s assume for a moment that Wilson’s interpretation of the law is correct. (A later version of the Chron story suggests that even Wilson now has his doubts about that.) If that were the case, what are the odds that more than 90% of the signatures he claims to have collected are valid? The rule of thumb for petition gathering like this is that you need at least double the required amount to feel confident about qualifying for the ballot. Why would anyone think that Wilson would be meticulous enough to allow himself such a narrow margin of error? I think we all know the answer to that. This is just another pathetic attempt for attention by someone who’s made a living getting attention for himself for a long time.
I grow increasingly worried about these guys like Wilson who sit around in their free time, dreaming of ways that fictional perverts could do terrible things to ittle girls and old women.
To Wilson’s credit, he was at least smart about how he collected signatures – he mailed pre-printed petitions to known registered voters. With the exception of people whose registration status has changed since they signed it, the validity rate will be at or near 100%. He used the same method Steve Hotze used for some of the HERO petitions, which happens to be very expensive.
What the news either did not report or does not know is that Wilson has been peddling this petition for at least four years. I received a copy of the petition from someone four years ago before the HERO saga even began. He gets six months to gather the necessary signatures, and the fact that he’s been at this for four years means he kept failing to get enough signatures, the clock got reset, and he had to start over from zero.
That would explain why the net of potential signers was cast wider and wider to include people who would never sign it – Wilson simply ran out of people on his side because you can only ask someone to sign a petition so many times before they give up on you. At least we know he wasted tens of thousands of dollars to achieve this embarrassing failure. Now he can waste tens of thousands more to fail in court, too.