Proponents of Initiative 100, which would require voters to approve a new jail, walked into the Seattle City Clerk’s office with stacks of signed petitions this morning but were turned away. Members of the Committee for Efficiency and Fairness in Public Safety say they tried to submit 12,750 signatures—over 5,000 fewer than the city requires to qualify an initiative the ballot.

“We were informed that if we weren’t at the 18,000 signature threshold they wouldn’t accept them,” says Tim Harris, vice president of the group. The organization won’t file for an extension, he says. “Twenty days isn’t going to do it at this time of year, and there really isn’t a lot of difference between being 4,000 signatures short and 1,000 signatures short. Short is short.”

The group sought to prevent city officials from rubber stamping a new municipal jail instead of implementing incarceration alternatives, like drug treatment and pre-arrest diversion. The organization had raised $19,715 and formed a coalition of 40 organizations. Campaign leaders expressed confidence in April that they would get the measure on the November ballot, telling The Stranger, “We have to get 386 signatures a day, which is nothing.”

Despite failing to make the ballot, Harris, who is also the director of Real Change, says the campaign helped shift the debate toward holding off on a new jail. “It sounds like total spin to say that we have accomplished our goal, but we have accomplished our goal,” he says. “When we started organizing last fall on this, the jail was speeding toward final approval and the beginning of construction like a freight train with very little public process. The issue of whether a jail should be built was framed as completely inevitable.”

But since the campaign began, King County extended the city's contract to use the King County Jail on 5th Avenue and James Street through 2015. And every city council member, including relatively conservative city council member Jan Drag, now opposes a new jail.