Washington State Says People Who Signed R71 Petition Didn't Need to Be Registered Voters at the Time

People who signed anti-gay Referendum 71 may not have been registered voters at the time, but state elections officials say they will count their signatures anyway. As Box Turtle Bulletin noted, the secretary of state's office defended the state's legally murky position today on its blog: There is no deadline for registering to vote for purposes of qualifying an initiative or referendum; as a practical matter, the deadline is the date that the signature on the petition is checked. Checkers are instructed that a signature on a petition is valid if they find a person with the same name in the voter registration file, and the signature on the petition matches the signature in the voter registration file. The registration date has never been a limiting factor. Secretary of state's office spokeswoman Christina Siderius, who wrote the blog post, says the problem arises because the state cannot determine the date people signed the petition—and thus cannot determine if they were registered to vote at the time. State law doesn't require petition signers to include the date they signed next to their name. "It becomes a little more difficult for us to sit around and speculate when someone registered and when they signed," she says. According the office's interpretation of the rules, she says, "Our policy basically states that if you are a registered voter when we check the signature, then we we count it." Full Story from The Stranger

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