The legislature flopped at the polls Tuesday if results on the three constitutional amendments it recommended are a measure of voter confidence in the wisdom of the Republican-controlled General Assembly.
Two were decisively defeated and a third seems headed for defeat as well, though by a much smaller margin.
With 97.3 percent of the vote counted, the secretary of state reports:
Issue 1, to allow the legislature to call itself into session rather than allowing only the governor that privilege, is being defeated 61 to 39 percent.
Issue 2, to require a 60 percent vote to pass ballot measures such as this one, is being defeated 59-31.
Issue 3, a so-called religious freedom amendment (actually a tool to discriminate using religion as a pretext, the work of Bro. Jason Rapert, whose opposition to true religious freedom is memorialized in a marble slab on the Capitol grounds) is being defeated by this count:
Dallas County was missing for the longest time, but it finally reported a 1,022-963 defeat of Issue 3 shortly before noon today, according to the secretary of state.
The count is missing about 10 percent of the vote in Lee County, by my reading of the secretary of state website. Issue 3 is leading in Lee 337-263, so the remaining votes there seem unlikely to have a significant impact on the current margin against 3 of almost 7,500 votes.
Totally missing from the secretary of state’s count is Phillips County, which has been plagued by election difficulties since early voting began. Andrew Bagley of the Helena World tells me that mail absentee and provisional ballots are still outstanding. But he also provided me with the county’s tally on election day and early voting: 998-974 FOR Issue 3. This is not currently included in the secretary of state numbers. But, again, the number of votes remaining and the indication of minor changes based on the votes already counted seem to point the way to defeat of Issue 3.
Sorry, Bro. Rapert.