Published: Sunday, August 30, 2009
Fight over Referendum 71 may change elections
The first thing you notice in the basement of the Secretary of State’s Office is the silence.
It is an uneasy quiet, a deceptive calm, for this is and has been for weeks the eye of the political hurricane known as Referendum 71.
Hour after hour, election workers are examining each of 137,689 signatures collected on referendum petitions to determine which belong to registered voters.
Peering over their shoulders, tracking every twitch and tally, are observers from opposing camps of those behind the measure and those set on keeping it off the ballot.
Tuesday, state election officials think they’ll know if Referendum 71 is ready to go before voters in November.
At stake is whether here in Washington same-sex couples registered with the state as domestic partners will become legally indistinguishable from married heterosexual couples.
There’s a new law granting these marriage-like rights and responsibilities to gay and lesbian couples and unmarried seniors in domestic partnerships. But that law is not in force yet, and the purpose of the referendum is to prevent it from ever taking effect.
Outside the calm of the elections office is where the breadth and ferocity of this storm fueled by Referendum 71 is pounding the state.
There are already excess quantities of vitriol in press releases and menacing language online, and the asinine factor will multiply should the measure make the ballot.
Then there are the lawsuits filed and anticipated.
Sponsors feel they’ll be cheated out of success because good signatures won’t even be counted. Their opponents argue there’s no way the measure should qualify because too many bad signatures are getting added to the final tally.
Both sides raise intriguing questions that could leave the landscape of elections forever changed.
For example, Protect Marriage Washington thinks it got shorted on time allowed under the state constitution to turn in signatures, and it cost them a thousand.
The deadline was July 25. The group handed in 137,689 signatures at 5 p.m., then found 1,000 more in a box in a car a few minutes later.
Election officials would not let them be added to the pile, citing a state law specifying 5 p.m. as the cutoff. The state constitution doesn’t set a time, saying only petitions are due “not later than ninety days after the final adjournment of the session of the Legislature which passed the measure.”
Protect Marriage Washington points out adjournment came at midnight. They may end up in court fighting to figure out what is a day, or 90 of them, in such matters.
On the other side, Washington Families Standing Together contends hundreds of signatures have been wrongly counted as valid. It sued last week to prevent the state from putting the measure on the ballot until the matter is cleared up.
It argues that if a person was not a registered voter when they signed the petition, then their signature should not be counted. The state is counting those. Officials say a signature is valid as long as the person shows up as a registered voter when their name is plugged into the database. This issue is magnified by the state’s use of the wrong database when it started checking signatures. The state switched when an observer saw someone they knew to be registered ruled invalid.
Since using a newer database, 1,098 signatures initially ruled invalid are now counted as good.
And then there’s the effort of Protect Marriage Washington to hide the names of petition signers and donors from the public.
The group says the heat of harassment is scaring people out of the process, which amounts to an infringement of their constitutional rights to participate in politics.
This Thursday, they’ll tell a federal judge how bad it’s gotten, including a Republican candidate for state representative who received a death threat by phone.
With winds blowing hard in all directions in this storm, it’s hard to believe the campaign hasn’t even started.
Read political reporter Jerry Cornfield’s blog, The Petri Dish, at www.heraldnet.com. He can be heard at 8:15 a.m. Mondays on the Morning Show on KSER 90.7 FM. Contact him at 360-352-8623 or jcornfield@heraldnet.com.
It is an uneasy quiet, a deceptive calm, for this is and has been for weeks the eye of the political hurricane known as Referendum 71.
Hour after hour, election workers are examining each of 137,689 signatures collected on referendum petitions to determine which belong to registered voters.
Peering over their shoulders, tracking every twitch and tally, are observers from opposing camps of those behind the measure and those set on keeping it off the ballot.
Tuesday, state election officials think they’ll know if Referendum 71 is ready to go before voters in November.
At stake is whether here in Washington same-sex couples registered with the state as domestic partners will become legally indistinguishable from married heterosexual couples.
There’s a new law granting these marriage-like rights and responsibilities to gay and lesbian couples and unmarried seniors in domestic partnerships. But that law is not in force yet, and the purpose of the referendum is to prevent it from ever taking effect.
Outside the calm of the elections office is where the breadth and ferocity of this storm fueled by Referendum 71 is pounding the state.
There are already excess quantities of vitriol in press releases and menacing language online, and the asinine factor will multiply should the measure make the ballot.
Then there are the lawsuits filed and anticipated.
Sponsors feel they’ll be cheated out of success because good signatures won’t even be counted. Their opponents argue there’s no way the measure should qualify because too many bad signatures are getting added to the final tally.
Both sides raise intriguing questions that could leave the landscape of elections forever changed.
For example, Protect Marriage Washington thinks it got shorted on time allowed under the state constitution to turn in signatures, and it cost them a thousand.
The deadline was July 25. The group handed in 137,689 signatures at 5 p.m., then found 1,000 more in a box in a car a few minutes later.
Election officials would not let them be added to the pile, citing a state law specifying 5 p.m. as the cutoff. The state constitution doesn’t set a time, saying only petitions are due “not later than ninety days after the final adjournment of the session of the Legislature which passed the measure.”
Protect Marriage Washington points out adjournment came at midnight. They may end up in court fighting to figure out what is a day, or 90 of them, in such matters.
On the other side, Washington Families Standing Together contends hundreds of signatures have been wrongly counted as valid. It sued last week to prevent the state from putting the measure on the ballot until the matter is cleared up.
It argues that if a person was not a registered voter when they signed the petition, then their signature should not be counted. The state is counting those. Officials say a signature is valid as long as the person shows up as a registered voter when their name is plugged into the database. This issue is magnified by the state’s use of the wrong database when it started checking signatures. The state switched when an observer saw someone they knew to be registered ruled invalid.
Since using a newer database, 1,098 signatures initially ruled invalid are now counted as good.
And then there’s the effort of Protect Marriage Washington to hide the names of petition signers and donors from the public.
The group says the heat of harassment is scaring people out of the process, which amounts to an infringement of their constitutional rights to participate in politics.
This Thursday, they’ll tell a federal judge how bad it’s gotten, including a Republican candidate for state representative who received a death threat by phone.
With winds blowing hard in all directions in this storm, it’s hard to believe the campaign hasn’t even started.
Read political reporter Jerry Cornfield’s blog, The Petri Dish, at www.heraldnet.com. He can be heard at 8:15 a.m. Mondays on the Morning Show on KSER 90.7 FM. Contact him at 360-352-8623 or jcornfield@heraldnet.com.
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