“Voters are pretty much like he Democrats in congress, in that they vote for iniatives and people without reading the bill first .”
From what I understand, I-594 consists of 18 pages of fairly dense legalese.
Few voters are motivated to read 18 pages, let alone with a careful enough attention to details to come up with the chart noted earlier.
This passed because the low information voters were not informed by anyone else of what the initiative really did. The old media was totally “in” to pass this. The did not run any countervailing information, except, perhaps, some comments, or so I have read.
The NRA spent about 6% of what the “progressives” spent on this. There did not seem to be a real campaign to oppose this. Instead, there was a campaign to pass the alternate measure, I-591. To show the level of information and confusion in the voters, at least 10% of the people who voted for I-594 also voted for I-591. I suspect that this could have been defeated if it had received real opposition.
Now we face an emboldened foe who will spend millions to duplicate this effort, when real resistance in Washington, and the defeat of I-594 would have completely disheartened them.
Maybe, I knew to vote against it because zi heard from gun rights advocates that both gun initiatives were an infringement on the second amendment.
My husband and I have a rule that unless we understand what we are voting for, we vote NO, especially if it involves a tax increase.
There is a problem with Republicans in WA, they have been infiltrated by people who are not conservative and have different values. Preserving the constitution isn’t one of them. We have the former head of the local teachers union trying to get into the central committee of the Whatcom Co GOP and a man whose father-in-law founded SSA, the Steam Ship Workers of America, the ILWU union. It’s a mess.