Thurston County Superior Court Judge Thomas McPhee has given a go-ahead for a statewide vote Nov. 3 on Washington’s new “everything but marriage” law expanding benefits for state-registered domestic partners.

McPhee dismissed a challenge brought by supporters of the law, Washington Families Standing Together.  In a lengthy  statement delivered from the bench following wide-ranging oral arguments, the judge fully sided with the Secretary of State’s handling of signature-checks for Referendum 71 and dismissed all of the points made by the challengers.

The jurist said the state’s decision to allow people to simultaneously register and sign petitions is very reasonable, with the “date of check” being the real deadline for the registration to be processed and in the state voter rolls.  He even accepted more than 40 signatures of voters whose registration entered the voter rolls after the sponsors’ July 25 signature turn-in.  McPhee also agreed with the Secretary’s decision not to discard signatures from petiti0ns without the solicitor’s signature on the back. That would have meant throwing out over 35,000 signatures. The sponsors barely qualified.

“We’re pleased and gratified with the judge’s strong ruling, and now it’s time to move on, to get the Voters’ Pamphlet printed and ballots prepared,” said state Elections Director Nick Handy. “It was a close check and we used great care in checking each of the signatures. There were many legal issues here, and we’re happy that the judge has concurred with our handling of the process.  I was so glad to see how respectful the judge was in protecting the people’s right to referendum.”

Secretary of State Sam Reed concurred, and congratulated the elections team for its signature-checking process during a high-pressure, high-visibility setting probably unprecedented in the nearly one century the state Constitution has permitted initiatives and referenda.  He also praised the work of the attorney general’s office in defending the Elections Division.

The challengers declined to say whether they will make a last-ditch appeal to the state Supreme Court, but indicated they still want to investigate some of the signatures that were accepted by the state Elections Division workers.

The Elections Division released a final signature count that subtracted 227 signatures from the accepted pile. The new number is 121,780, about 1,200 more than the bare number needed to qualify for the ballot.  The challengers had asked for a list of all the accepted signatures, and in compiling that for release, the Elections Division did a new hand count.  The discrepancy was due to an accumulation of a number of small math errors.