Referendum 71 is currently 509,673 – 51.1% Approved to 487,808 – 48.9% Rejected. The Secretary of State estimates 339,665 ballots remain to be counted statewide. About 1/3 from King County alone (115,000 ballots).
I have plugged in the percentage of people that Approved or Rejected Ref. 71 from every single county into a spreadsheet and multiplied it by the number of estimated remaining ballots from each county. When you add up the projected results of the remaining ballots you get 181,985 additional people Approve Ref. 71 and an additional 157,680 Reject Ref. 71.
This means if everything remains constant (which it won’t) and the remaining ballot estimates are accurate (which they probably are not) then Ref. 71 would finish with those voting Approve at 51.7%. But for some reason they estimate zero ballots remaining from Pierce County which that alone cannot be accurate.
UPDATE: Pierce County now expects 50,000 more ballots which will make the measure a lot closer to 50%.
