Voter turn out is traditionally low in off year elections. We must turn out the vote to approve referendum 71 to protect ALL Washington families.
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The Secretary of State continues to verify signatures during the referendum 71 qualification process. There is a lot of chatter on blogs and newspapers about whether referendum 71 will qualify, and several people are beginning to jump to the false conclusion that because the data is showing an increasing number of invalid signatures that this fight is nearly over. At this early stage it is not only mathematically inaccurate to draw conclusions based on daily counts, it is politically dangerous. It is not the word “marriage” that bothers them, it is gay people that bother them. They would prefer our families to be completely isolated from society — completely separate. They do not want to share ANYTHING with us. In Wisconsin the fundamentalists immediately filed suit against the state, claiming domestic partnerships are “close enough to marriage” to violate the constitutional amendment The Secretary of State announced today that they have a raw count of 137, 689 signatures on the R-71 petition. 120,557 valid signatures are needed to qualify referendum 71 for the ballot. Historically 18% of signatures are invalid for various reasons. The cushion for R-71 is 14.2 %, so we are still in the too close to call range. Because the margin is so close, the Secretary of State’s office will conduct a line by line review of the petition and will compare every signature against the voting record. If a signature does not match the voting record it will be disqualified. If there are duplicate signatures the duplicates will be removed. The Secretary of State’s office announced on Tuesday through their blog that they will conduct a complete verification of the entire petition rather than a 3 % sampling. While I think it is fantastic that every single signature will be scrutinized, it could be several weeks before we know the results. It does not hurt to start thinking about the future. What if Referendum 71 does qualify for the ballot? What next? We need to switch our thinking from decline to sign to Approve Referendum 71, Preserve the Domestic Partnership Law. That’s right, Approve. This is how the referendum will look if it makes the ballot in November: |
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