Today at 5pm was the deadline for Oregon's counties to complete their signature verification process. Tomorrow the Secretary of State will announce whether or not it has been certified.

Just a refresher on the situation.

This law, signed by Governor Kulongoski on May 9th of this year (video of signing), will ban discrimination based on sexual orientation in employment, housing and public accommodation.

A few fringe anti-gay groups organized together (and I use organized very lightly) in an attempt to put a referendum on the November 2008 ballot. They needed to collect 55,179 valid signatures to accomplish this. When they turned in their signatures with just about 30 minutes left to spare on their 3 month window, they claimed they had 63,000.

The Secretary of State's office then went through the first round of verification. In that round they look for any major irregularities or incorrect sheets and discard them. Following that process there were 59,761 signatures. From there samples went out to Oregon counties for further verification.

Now here we are. Just hours until we find out if anti-gay groups have succeeded in forcing a public vote on whether or not a person should be fired from their job SIMPLY for being gay - or even being denied housing JUST because they are gay or lesbian.

Our prediction at here at GRW is that they will fail based on the other referendum attempt on the Domestic Partnership law also passed n May 9th. After the first round of verification it had 60,531 that then went to the counties for further scrutiny. That one ended up failing by 116 signatures earlier this week.

We'll be watching this story closely tomorrow and will announce the outcome as soon as we hear.

Labels: 2008 elections, anti-discrimination, domestic partnership, oregon, referendum

This entry was posted on Thursday, October 11, 2007 at 11:21 PM. Want to discuss? Leave a comment below.