How Many Signatures Do You Need?

Understanding Validity Rates and Why Most Campaigns Get It Wrong

Whether you're trying to qualify a citizen initiative, get a referendum on the ballot, or help a candidate secure a spot in a primary, your entire campaign hinges on one deceptively simple question:

How many signatures do we need?

The legal requirement might be the first number you look up—but it's also the wrong number to build your strategy around.

The Legal Minimum Is a Mirage

Every state provides a target, often written into the constitution or state code, for how many valid signatures are required for ballot access. In Utah, for example, a statewide initiative currently requires 140,748 valid signatures spread across at least 26 of 29 Senate districts.

But let me be clear: if you collect exactly 140,748 signatures, you are almost guaranteed to fail.

Why? Because signatures get rejected. A lot of them. Every campaign has a validity rate, and the sooner you understand yours, the better.

What Is a Validity Rate?

The validity rate is the percentage of raw signatures submitted that are ultimately verified and accepted by election officials.

Invalid signatures come in all shapes and sizes:

• People who aren’t registered to vote

• Voters signing outside of their correct district or county

• Duplicate signers (accidental or intentional)

• Signatures that are illegible, incomplete, or printed instead of signed

• Individuals using nicknames or different legal names from the voter file

• In rare cases, forged entries or signatures from bad-faith actors

In short: not every name you collect gets counted. The real question is how many won’t—and whether you’ve planned for that margin of error.

What’s a Typical Validity Rate?

This is where strategy, training, and targeting come into play. Validity rates aren’t fixed—they vary depending on how the campaign is run:

Strategy Type	Typical Validity Rate
Well-trained paid teams with real-time vetting and voter file targeting	70–80%
Highly targeted signature gathering using active voter lists	80–85%
Volunteers or public-area collection with loose oversight	50–60% or lower
Zero training, no QA, or paid-by-signature fraud risk	<50% (and likely to get challenged)

In Utah, well-managed paid campaigns average 72–76%. Volunteer-heavy efforts without validation protocols often dip into the 50s, sometimes worse.

Why You Need to Overshoot—By a Lot

Let’s say your campaign needs 10,000 valid signatures, and you project a 70% validity rate:

10,000 ÷ 0.70 = 14,285 raw signatures needed

But here’s the truth: if your margin for error is just 285 signatures, you’re rolling the dice with months of work and hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Experienced campaigns build in a 15–25% buffer beyond the math. So for a 10,000-signature requirement:

• Safe estimate: 14,285

• Strategic target: 15,000+

• Peace of mind: 16,000–17,000

Overshooting your goal isn’t wasted effort—it’s smart insurance. There’s no refund on a failed campaign.

Why Campaigns Fall Short (And How to Avoid It)

Most failed initiatives don’t die at the ballot box—they die on the validation spreadsheet.

Here’s why:

• They relied too heavily on volunteers without quality control

• They didn’t monitor field data in real time

• They hit their signature count but forgot to factor in district or county distribution

• They submitted too close to the deadline with no room for rework

• They were penny-wise and pound-foolish, skimping on vetting and training to “save” money

You can have the most compelling message in the world, but if your petition doesn’t pass validation, none of it matters.

Pro Tip: Build a Validity Monitoring System

Don’t wait for counties to tell you whether your campaign is going to make it. The most successful operations track validity as they go.

This includes:

• Voter file matching: Cross-checking names and addresses against the voter database before submission

• Daily sampling audits: Reviewing a randomized batch of signatures each night for red flags

• Canvasser report cards: Tracking individual performance to identify weak links

• Geographic tracking: Making sure your collection meets district or county thresholds

• Third-party validation: Hiring external firms to QA your data for objectivity and oversight

We’ve run over 70 field campaigns across the U.S., and I can tell you with confidence: field quality is never accidental—it’s engineered.

The Bottom Line

Signature gathering is a numbers game—but it’s one you can absolutely win if you respect the math, prepare for attrition, and run a field program that treats validation like the endgame.

If you think success means hitting the number on paper, think again.

Real success comes from building a cushion, tracking your data, and knowing your validity rate before the state does.

You only get one shot at the ballot. Make it count.