Yay, Washington!
The No On 74 people have conceded. Washington state has marriage equality!
Looks like people will be able to get married in Washington as early as December 9 of this year. Only a month away!
The abovelinked blog entry says, among other things:
With added results showing that we have not closed the gap, it now appears clear that Referendum 74 will be narrowly approved.
Can I just note in passing that a 52% no-marriage-equality vote in California in 2008 was considered The Voice Of The People? The anti-equality people talked about it as if All Californians had spoken in one unified voice.
Whereas they're now referring to a 52.4% yes-marriage-equality vote in Washington as “narrowly approved.” Feh.
And by the way, the gap in WA between Yes and No has widened over the past two days from its original 3.5% (I think?) to its current 4.7%. (It was briefly up to nearly 5% earlier, and my spreadsheet predicts it'll end up at just over 5% when all ballots are counted.)
Anyway, looks like my fears in my previous entry were indeed groundless after all. Whew.
(Some specific numbers: The number of remaining unprocessed ballots is now around 650,000; the gap between Yes and No is now about 110,000 votes. So the remaining ballots would have to be 59% No to catch up. About half of the counties have been more than 59% No so far, but most of those strong-No counties have under 10,000 ballots remaining to be counted. Only one of them has more than 12,000 uncounted ballots remaining (20,000 in Yakima), and King County's remaining 244,000 ballots are likely to continue to be 2/3 Yes, which will more than make up for any remaining Nos.)
So the current tally of jurisdictions within US borders that have marriage equality: Nine US states, the District of Columbia, and two tribes.
The number of people living in those jurisdictions totals about 15.8% of the US population (according to 2011 estimates), so roughly a sixth of the US population now has access to same-sex marriage within their home jurisdictions.
Next step: On November 20, the week after next, the US Supreme Court will be discussing whether to consider various marriage-related cases. They may or may not make announcements the following week about which cases they'll look at. Most of the cases (eight or ten, I think) are about DOMA, which keeps getting overturned by federal courts; two of those overrulings were on different grounds, though, so I gather the Court is likely to take up at least one DOMA case, to resolve the contradiction.
The other relevant case is California's Prop 8. If the Court decides not to consider that, then Prop 8 is repealed and marriages can happen again. If the Court decides to take the Prop 8 appeal, though, then a decision might not happen 'til mid-2013 or so.
Anyway, all that's in the future. For now, I'm just basking in four states' worth of ballot-box victories.