After a tepid signature-gathering campaign that took more than a year to pick up what little steam it had, Seattle Districts Now turned in 27,000 signatures to the King County Elections Office on Monday, July 28, and hopes to pull together another 10,000 in the coming month as a cushion to cover invalid signatures.

Districts campaign manager Jay Sauceda says he feels "pretty good" about collecting the 26,000 valid signatures the campaign will need to qualify the districts initiative for the November ballot. "We feel like our validation rate is probably pretty good," Sauceda says, noting that volunteers had excised names that were obviously fake from signature sheets collected from the campaign's unmanned kiosks. Although county election officials couldn't provide an average validation rate, the campaign should turn in about 34,000 names to be safe. And one election worker says unmonitored kiosks "only increase the odds" that people will sign twice or give inaccurate information. "Untended kiosks in front of the PCC are not a good way to screen registered voters," notes local political consultant Christian Sinderman. And they're a pretty lackluster way of gathering political momentum.

In addition to the kiosks, Seattle Districts Now solicited paid help from the social-justice organization ACORN (Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now), whose members believe a city council elected by districts will better represent ACORN's low-income, South Seattle constituency. Although ACORN has run successful petition drives in Baltimore and San Francisco, ACORN organizer Jenny Lawson concedes that the group has never run a similar campaign in Seattle. "Locally, this is our first initiative campaign," she says. And it was a bit of a disappointment to districts fans that the leaders of the districts campaign handed off the job to a separate group with other pressing priorities on its agenda.

Even if the measure qualifies, the districts campaign faces some serious hurdles. For starters, it's flat broke, with less than $3,000 in the bank. And much of the campaign's financial support comes from loser city council candidates (Curt Firestone, Daniel Norton, and the like) whose credit with mainstream Seattle is less than sterling. "I think no one [in the political world] is paying one bit of attention to" districts, Sinderman says. "The fact that it might qualify for the ballot is shocking to me because it hadn't even crossed my radar screen."

barnett@thestranger.com