Opposition to Tim Eyman’s I‑1366 climbs above 48% across Washington State

Near­ly one week after Elec­tion Day 2015, oppo­si­tion to Tim Eyman’s I‑1366 is still ris­ing as late bal­lots con­tin­ue to be count­ed. Today, the NO vote statewide sur­passed 48%, an impor­tant mile­stone, and now stands at 670,085 votes.

About 68,473 bal­lots remain to be processed by coun­ty elec­tions offi­cials, accord­ing to the lat­est esti­mate. The gap between Yes and No is cur­rent­ly 56,992 votes. Per­cent­age-wise, the gap is like­ly to tight­en a lit­tle more as count­ing goes on, though not enough to change the out­come, as we pro­ject­ed last Tues­day night.

King Coun­ty has the lion’s share of the uncount­ed bal­lots… 48,306, accord­ing to today’s esti­mate. And in King Coun­ty, the NO on I‑1366 vote has been grow­ing stronger by the day. It’s cur­rent­ly an impres­sive 61.06%.

I‑1366 will need to be fin­ished off in court, and a num­ber of edi­to­r­i­al boards have joined the cho­rus call­ing for the ini­tia­tive to be giv­en an expe­di­ent bur­ial, includ­ing The Seat­tle Times, The Olympian, and the Spokesman-Review.

This week­end, in his most excel­lent recur­ring col­umn The Wrap, Seat­tle Times colum­nist Ron Judd did some quick math and put the vote for Eyman’s I‑1366 in prop­er per­spec­tive, com­plete with a healthy dose of sarcasm.

All Hail Super-Minor­i­ty Rule: Con­sid­er the actu­al vot­ing num­bers behind Ini­tia­tive 1366, the Good-Gov­ern­ment Pre­ven­tion Act. The lat­est Eyman bank-account fluffer, which seeks to insti­tu­tion­al­ize minor­i­ty rule by estab­lish­ing a de-fac­to tax veto by 34 per­cent of leg­is­la­tors, as of Fri­day had gar­nered 640,717 statewide affir­ma­tive votes. In a state with near­ly 4 mil­lion reg­is­tered vot­ers, that’s a ‘yes’ rate of 16 per­cent. Pow­er to the peo­ple, baby.

Big props to Judd for point­ing out how lit­tle sup­port I‑1366 is actu­al­ly get­ting. Most Wash­ing­ton vot­ers stayed home in 2015, and of those who did vote, near­ly half said NO to I‑1366, leav­ing only a small frac­tion who vot­ed yes.

In the Leg­is­la­ture, it takes fifty votes in the House to pass a bill, and twen­ty-five in the Sen­ate. That’s set forth in Arti­cle II, Sec­tion 22, the very pro­vi­sion of the Con­sti­tu­tion Eyman wants to sab­o­tage with I‑1366.

If ini­tia­tives and ref­er­en­da required a sim­i­lar absolute major­i­ty to pass, I‑1366 would be fail­ing right now, owing to this year’s his­tor­i­cal­ly awful turnout.

Per­haps it’s time to add a min­i­mum turnout require­ment to our Con­sti­tu­tion for pas­sage of ini­tia­tives and ref­er­en­da, spec­i­fy­ing that an absolute major­i­ty of reg­is­tered vot­ers is need­ed for state law to be changed at the bal­lot by the peo­ple. A sim­i­lar require­ment could be added for pas­sage of con­sti­tu­tion­al amendments.

Either that, or return to the prac­tice of only plac­ing mea­sures on the statewide bal­lot in even-num­bered years, when turnout is reli­ably above fifty per­cent. This is how it works in Ore­gon. It’s also how it used to work here until state law was changed to pro­vide for state-lev­el gen­er­al elec­tions in odd-num­bered years.

With few­er than 70,000 bal­lots remain­ing to be count­ed, it appears statewide turnout will remain below 40%, which would set a new mod­ern record for low turnout. We haven’t had a gen­er­al elec­tion with so lit­tle par­tic­i­pa­tion in decades. I’ll have more data and reflec­tions on the awful turnout in a fol­low-up post tomorrow.