Elections in United States

November 5, 2004 permalink

In Tuesday's American Elections, eleven states, Arkansas, Georgia, Kentucky, Michigan, Montana, Mississippi, Ohio, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Oregon and Utah, voted on referendums outlawing same-sex marriage, and all eleven measures were approved by large majorities. Voters in Louisiana and Missouri voted out same-sex marriage earlier this year, and a referendum in Massachusetts was scuttled by the state legislature two years ago, but will likely be on next year's ballot in some form. Same-sex marriage remains legal in Ontario, where there is no provision for a referendum.

Paula Werme, a New Hampshire lawyer who has made a career of opposing DCF, the local child protection agency, was defeated as a candidate for the state legislature. In a race in which top three vote-getters got elected, she finished fifth with 3775 votes, while the third-place finisher got 4103 votes.

In Charlotte North Carolina, Jack Stratton, a father of ten home-schooled children lost to child-protectors, ran for the Mecklenburg Board of County Commissioners. In a race in which the top three were elected, he finished a distant seventh with, by nearly complete early returns, 13,321 votes. The third place finisher had 144,409 votes.

In Massachusetts, a referendum asked whether voters want their state representative "to vote for legislation to create a strong presumption in child custody cases in favor of joint physical and legal custody, so that the court will order that children have equal access to both parents as much as possible, except where there is clear and convincing evidence that one parent is unfit, or that joint custody is not possible due to the fault of one of the parents". Legal maneuvering before the election eliminated the phrase "shared parenting" from the ballot question. Still, the vote was 557,615 yes to 90,708 no.