OK — so it’s the day of the election! If you’re curious, you can see the amount of ballots in King County (the county that has Seattle, and which votes entirely by mail) that have already been received here. There doesn’t appear to be a similar site for the statewide returns, but that makes sense, since each county has its own election office, and while they’re all vote-by mail as well, perhaps not all of them have those statistics online and available. However, it does appear that, according to the Secretary of State’s site that King County has about a third of the active voter registrations.

Luckily, the polls do seem to show R-71 as likely to pass — though, of course, polls aren’t the same as actual election results, so they can only provide a bit of good news and hope, but we mustn’t take those as gospel.

We probably won’t know the turnout for a while — I’m not sure if they’ve started to count votes that have been received or if they’re waiting for the end of election day — so unless there’s an extreme landslide, we’ll probably have to wait a bit. Every county uses paper ballots, so we will have a paper trail and no worries about any bugs in any electronic voting machines. So, while it won’t be as fast a count, it’ll at least, hopefully be more accurate — and at least allowing for easier, more accurate recounts, should it come to that.

Of course, I hope it DOES come in a landslide victory for R-71 — it certainly would be morally, but that doesn’t always correspond with elections when rights are put up to vote. To echo the Anti-R.71 campaign’s radio ad, maybe once we pass Ref. 71, then the legislature can stop being harassed by these kooks and start working on other issues. Gay marriage is an important issue, but, honestly, it seems a little obvious. Too obvious to spend so much time on. Just approve it already. It just makes sense, and it’s the only decision that makes sense given the principles America was founded on — the biggest, most important of which is Freedom.