Election officials have begun processing Referendum 71 petitions submitted by foes of a new
“everything but marriage” domestic partnership law.  It seems likely that a full signature check will be required, rather than a speedier random-sample check.

The sponsors, Protect Marriage Washington, hope to force a public vote in November on Senate Bill 5688, which extends all of the rights and responsibilities now afforded to marriage couples to same-sex partners and opposite-sex couples where one or more partners is 62 or older. The couples need to be signed up with the state domestic partnership registry to qualify.

Sponsors on Saturday submitted what they estimated were 138,000 voter signatures.  The Elections Division won’t verify a gross turn-in number until later in the week after petitions are returned being microfilmed and digitized by the State Archives.  It takes 120,577 valid signatures to get on the ballot, so sponsors have a pad of roughly 14 percent to cover any invalid signatures.  That’s well below the 18 percent historic average error rate for ballot measures, and some initiatives have had invalidation rates well into the 20s.

Elections official Shane Hamlin says, “We are reasonably confident they failed to submit enough signatures to rely on a random sampling method to verify the validity of the signatures. So we are preparing to conduct a full signature verification.” The final decision will be made once the crews have a firm signature count.
The full-check takes several weeks, rather than the several-day task of random sampling.