Tweet
I recently talked about how the entire state of Washington has increased its propensity to vote pro-equality. Now I want to talk about how vital to the approval of Referendum 71 non-Puget-Sound voters were. Via Referendum 71, voters ratified the new domestic partnership law in Washington, making domestic partnerships fully equal to civil marriage under state law.
When the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court made its landmark Goodridge ruling in 2003 actualizing marriage equality in that state, there were immediate calls for the impeachment of Chief Justice Margaret Marshall. Goodridge was a 4-3 ruling, and Justice Marshall was seen as “the deciding vote”. My thought at the time was, there is no deciding vote because if any of the 4 justices voting in the majority had voted differently, the ruling would have been different. Each of those 4 votes for the plaintiffs were of equal value and none (or all) were “the deciding vote”.
I have a similar view of the Referendum 71 vote. The common refrain is that ten Puget Sound counties “decided for the state”, the population-dense King County in particular. It is true that voters in these counties played an important roll in approving R-71, but they didn’t come anywhere near swinging the vote on their own.
Referendum 71 was approved by a margin of 112,980 votes. Yes, there were 29 counties that rejected R-71 overall. But those counties still produced 302,106 votes to approve. That’s over 2.5 times the margin of victory. In other words, if equality voters in the so-called “reject” counties had recycled their ballots rather than vote, R-71 would have been rejected handily.
Election maps that present binary approve/reject results (e.g., right) for counties misrepresent the results to the degree they give the impression that counties not approving a measure overall weren’t materially vital to its statewide approval. Here is the list of counties vital to the approval of R-71:
Yakima, Whitman, Whatcom, Walla Walla, Wahkiakum, Thurston, Stevens, Spokane, Snohomish, Skamania, Skagit, San Juan, Pierce, Pend Orielle, Pacific, Okanogan, Mason, Lincoln, Lewis, Klickitat, Kittitas, Kitsap, King, Jefferson, Island, Grays Harbor, Grant, Garfield, Franklin, Ferry, Douglas, Cowlitz, Columbia, Clark, Clallam, Chelan, Benton, Asotin, Adams
In other words, every single one. Or rather none. Because at the end of the day, all that matters is that ballots were cast, not which county the voter lives in. Every vote is equal in contributing to the total, and a significant number of that total came from outside the Puget trough. Every vote was the deciding vote. Every county tipped the balance for Referendum 71.Cross-posted at Washblog.
18 Comments
What would be more useful…would be a graphic that showed the %age of voters in each county who voted for equality, shown as a shade or grey (or some other colour).
That would be usefulI would love to see a graphic for the 18-24 age group. I’m sure you’d see a lot more green…
Of course the problem with them is that THEY DON’T VOTE!!!
I think that’s coming… all precinct data should be out now, and folks typically map this sorta thing.
Yes and noYes, every “approve” vote counted, and were the “approve” votes in Eastern Washington not to have been cast, the measure would have failed, but only on account of the “reject” votes that were also cast in Eastern Washington. If the Eastern Washington counties were not included at all in the total vote, the measure would have been approved by a much stronger margin.
That said, I’m a strong proponent of doing grassroots work in all areas, especially those where support is not a historic given.
check the mapcheck the map at the secretary of state’s office. as you roll your cursor over each county, you get the percentages for that county. what that map doesn’t do, however, is weight the result based on the voter population for each county. this creates an unfortunate illusion. for example, chelan county and spokane county each voted 39% in favor of r-71, but chelan has about 1/6 the voters as spokane.
any maps based on counties will be misleading because counties are only administrative units. it is appropriate that the secretary of state present the data this was for their purposes, but it can lead to some misinterpretations if one don’t recognize that your looking at a map of apples and oranges.
I look forward to seeing the precinct maps baconcat is talking about, since i think each precinct represents about the same number of people.
I know you’re referring to the group as a whole, but…I know more people in the 18-24 age group that voted than people in any other age group. Now my sample may be biased as I belong to that age group and live among people in a town heavily populated by people in that age group, but it still stands. However, this generalization is not a fair one, as many people in that age group do vote and know the importance and significance of voting, unlike some people in other age groups. My own father, a member of the ACLU, a man who would have voted for R-71, a man who belongs in the 50-59/50-64 age group, forgot to mail his ballot. I mailed it in the day after I got it.
east or west?Shouldn’t the headline read “western” instead of “eastern”? Puget Sound counties are in western Washington.
no, it is stated correctly.my thesis is that without the approve votes from people living in eastern washington, we would have lost. the same can be said for people living in western washington. in other words, this was a victory possible because of state-wide support, not just votes from the puget sound area. you don’t have to “win” a county to win the statewide vote, you just need support in every county. and we had that. so thank your friends in garfield county, pend orielle county, spokane county etc. without them we wouldn’t be celebrating the first day of full domestic partnerships today. :)
In that case…what’s needed is a map which shows the counties’ sizes proportional to their populations, although (of course) you’d have to group the eastern counties together into a single block as otherwise they’d vanish – King County and Ferry County are about the same size yet the former has a population several hundred times larger than the latter.
Counties should be ignored I thinkI really think that counties should be ignored as meaningful units of measure, for all the reasons we’ve discussed. They are administrative units and that is why the state reports the votes by county, but in social reality county boarders are fairly meaningless. This is why the precinct maps that Baconcat mentioned will be more interesting. It is nice to superimpose county boundaries on voter maps as a way of understanding precinct location, but beyond that I’m not convinced that looking at result by county is very useful.
Yes, this is a flaw in the “Red/Blue” polarizationIndeed; while I love maps just like this one, showing which areas (counties in this case, but more commonly Red/Blue states with US elections), people are prone to assuming “green counties GOOD, yellow counties BAD”, as if each county was monolithic and voted 100.000000% for/against the person/issue in question. HOW many times do we hear “progressive” blogs denigrate “Red state people” as if simply living in a state that went Red means you are a backwoods bigot? I’m sure somewhere in Washington, people are similalry denigrating “Yellow county people”.
The simple fact is, one vote is one vote. A vote in the heart of Capital Hill counts no more than one in the most rural part of Lincoln county. I do wish that maps would show far more granularity than they do on these matters.
An interesting argumentBasically, without the hundreds of thousands of Yes votes in eastern Washington, the margin of victory in the Puget Sound counties would not have been enough to overcome R71′s defeat in the east.
Though to be fair, if you eliminate the Yes votes in the east, we should be allowed to drop the 367,000 No votes in the west.
The underlying point is what’s critical — we have to educate and seek supporters everywhere. Even though a majority of Spokane County rejected R71, we can’t walk away from the fight there or anywhere else.
PROTECT MARRAGE WASH INFO MISSING FROM PDC WEBSITEInformation on Protect Marriage Washington’s receipts and expenditures for the R-71 campaign have apparently been removed from the Public Disclosure Commission’s website. I tried to access this info yesterday and this morning. I don’t know if this is a technical glitch, or if something more substantive (and sinister) is afoot. Could somebody check further into this?
they’ve become an ongoing committeethey’re still there, but now you have to look for them under the ongoing committee tab, not the statewide ballot measures tab. final pdc reports due one week from today – should be interesting…
FortunatelyWe don’t have to deal with an Electoral College for anything but the office of president and vice president. Would that we could do away with the EC for those also and make every person’s vote count.
Thanks, LurleenI was wondering where they went. I like to keep a watchful eye on the opposition. By the way, Gary Randall is firing back at Joe Fuiten. Although Gary claims to have forgiven Joe, he says “forgiveness is not synonymous with trust”.
Yeah, Fuiten seems permanently stuck in Randall’s craw.What kind of idiot doesn’t consider a jab posted on the internet “public”? Too hilarious.
I was born in Eastern WATri-cities area. I also still have many family members in the area. They have always been supportive. But I think Eastern Washington has experienced so much growth in new population and new industries over the past decade that I can’t say I am surprised that their community dynamics tend toward younger and more pluralistic ideas when voting. Even if much of the background of the area would be assumed conservative because it is still considered more rural than Puget sound.