We don't think so, which is why we agree with the state Supreme Court that county clerks should give voters who sign petitions the benefit of the doubt.

That's what the flap about signatures on the open-space initiative comes down to.

Sponsors of that initiative want to put a $150 million bond issue on the ballot in November. It would impose a statewide sales tax of .05 percent for an estimated 10 years. The money would buy land to protect water sources, wildlife habitat, farms and ranches, parks and trails.

To qualify for the ballot, the sponsors had to gather about 76,000 signatures statewide. That amounts to 10 percent of the voters who cast ballots for all candidates in the last election for governor. To demonstrate statewide support for an initiative, petitioners must meet this 10 percent threshold in 26 of the state's 29 Senate districts.

County clerks, who check petition signatures against voter lists, decided that the sponsors collected enough signatures in 24 Senate districts. But they said that the petition fell two signatures short in one district in Utah County and 228 short in another in Cache County.

The sponsors went to court, claiming that the county clerks had disqualified some signatures when the address listed with a particular name was not the same as the one in the voter registration files. The language of the law says that only the names need to be checked, but in many cases clerks also compare the addresses in the petitions to see if they correspond to voter records.

That can work in favor of the petition sponsors when a questionable signature can be matched with the known address of a voter. But it also can disqualify a signature, for example, when there are several voters with the same name and clerks cannot match each signer with a distinct name and address on the rolls.

The sponsors argued that this kind of disqualification is illegal, as the law is silent on how clerks should use addresses. The court ruled that clerks should give petition signers the benefit of the doubt, because it is just as likely that a voter moved, and had not filed a new address, as it is that the signer's name was false or that there had been some other mistake.

We agree with the court. At the same time, we do not fault the clerks, who, after all, are just trying to make sure that voters are who they say they are when they sign a petition, and that initiative sponsors haven't tried to pull a fast one. The court agreed that matching addresses is a valid way to confirm identities. But it said that the lack of an address should not, by itself, disqualify the signature of a voter whose name appears on the roll.

The Legislature can help to solve this by asking voters and petition signers to supply their birth dates as well as addresses. Those won't change when voters move.