Citizens in Charge

Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels says Sound Transit should rebound from Tuesday’s drubbing at the polls and come back with a new light rail plan for voters on the 2008 ballot.

Steps taken for local I&R.

Voters in Oregon defeated a ballot measure to fund a children’s health-care program by boosting tobacco taxes, the third time an industry campaign has helped defeat new taxes to fund such programs — and perhaps a signal to lawmakers in Washington regarding a similar plan to raise the federal tobacco tax.

Here’s a bracing corrective from reader Patrick Higgins, arguing that “the people” didn’t really speak, as we pundits like to say, since the large majority of voters stayed silent. Mr. Higgins, you have the microphone:

The roads-and-transit ballot measure may be dead, but one of its star projects, a new Evergreen Point Bridge, has state officials scrambling to salvage the $4.4 billion needed for the project.

“Off-year” elections do not attract the large number of referendums and issue initiatives that are typically found on ballots in presidential and congressional election years. But Tuesday, the Election Day for most states holding 2007 contests, featured a handful of ballot propositions that had national implications. The following are analyses of the outcomes of four of these measures.

Once again on a ballot measure, Mason Tvert pushed for allowing marijuana possession in Denver, and once again, he got it by a whopping vote total.

It took The Oregonian’s crack number crunchers all of 13 minutes to declare Measure 49 passed and Measure 50 failed.

Linn and Benton county voters overwhelmingly sided with the majority of Oregonians who want to redefine Oregon’s land use laws in voting in favor of Measure 49. Statewide the measure passed 572,997 to 361,555.

Cost-conscious voters rejected school vouchers for Utah students, state-sponsored stem cell research in New Jersey and higher cigarette taxes in Oregon to fund health care for uninsured children.