Local campaign workers have been concerned that this election would be affected by what happened in MA. I think they’re nuts, but we’ll see this evening.
Officially, election day is today (Jan 26). In reality, the election has been going on for a bit, since the ballots arrived in our mailboxes a couple of weeks ago.
The issues are Initiatives 66 and 67. For a quickie summary, see http://voteyesfororegon.org/wi…
Measures 66 & 67 raise the $10 corporate minimum for the first time since 1931, and increase the marginal tax rate on the richest Oregonians (those who make more than $250,000 a year).
Since all ballots must be in official Oregon vote boxes by 8pm today (I just dropped off ours at the library), we don’t suffer from the Washington time lag. (WA state accepts ballots postmarked by election day.)
Results should be known tonight/tomorrow morning, but the latest polling had the initiatives winning by a reasonable margin.
Initiative 66 raises the marginal tax rate on >$250k gross income
Initiative 67 raises the corporate minimum from $10 to $150
The poll assumes a current OR party registration of
D 47%
R 36%
I 17%
It’s a Tim Hibbitts poll, which is pretty much the gold standard for polling in Oregon.
Both measures were leading in the Hibbitts poll by 49/38. I fully expect that margin has closed a bit in these past few days, but that’s normal for a closely fought initiative campaign, especially when voters are asked to raise taxes.
Results should appear this evening, starting sometime after 8pm Pacific time at the OR SoS website at http://www.sos.state.or.us/ele… .
Updated thought – the Oregon “anti-tax” ads were more focused on the business tax (67) as opposed to the increase in taxes on >250k income (66). That’s reflected in the slight margin difference (66 is winning by a bit more than 67). But the difference in margins is less than 1%.
Second updated thought – no effect from the MA special. Yes, the Hibbitts poll suggests that a solid majority believe that we’re going in the wrong direction, but that anger didn’t affect the outcome of this election. (the MA Senate special election happened between this poll and the election)
Third updated thought (Wed 6:30 am PST) made a mistake in my vote watching – when county data says “100%”, it means 100% of those votes tabulated and counted.
(It takes a bit of time even for computers to check signatures on envelopes, open them up, before the optical scan ballots can be fed to the computer readers. Ballots are in a “secrecy” envelope, inserted into a signed mailing envelope, so there are two envelopes to open for each ballot.)
Votes that have come in late that day (e.g. from official collection stations at county libraries) aren’t yet all counted. The margins may still fluctuate a bit as those votes are counted today. (I think some counties sent their tabulaters home for the night.)
However, my eyeballing suggests that we’re now at about 97-98% counted, but maybe 3/4 of the outstanding ballots are from Multnomah Co, so the margin could grow back a bit.
Current results from the OR SoS
66 (raise the marginal rate on incomes > 250k)
yes 53.69%
no 46.31%
67 (raise the min bus tax from $10)
yes 53.03%
no 46.97%