Oklahoma voters have refused, by close to three to one, to let their Legislature decide what local government gets paid back for a five year manufacturing tax break
Nothing in Oklahoma's constitution changed on Tuesday, and that was the point of the exercise.
State Question 844 failed, 389,735 votes to 138,755, on unofficial returns from all 1,984 precincts posted by the State Election Board. That is 73.75 percent against. The margin is close to three to one.
What the measure did
It amended one subsection of Article 10, Section 6B, the clause that gives a qualifying manufacturing concern five years free of ad valorem tax on a new, expanded or acquired plant, and then obliges the Legislature to make the affected local bodies whole.
That obligation is specific about who gets paid: common schools, county governments, cities and towns, emergency medical services districts, vocational-technical schools, junior colleges, county health departments and libraries.
House Joint Resolution 1087, by Hilbert of the House and Paxton of the Senate, would have put a new instruction in front of it. The Legislature was to set the levels and methodologies of reimbursement "for the purpose of ensuring that no individual county shall receive reimbursement in amounts that result in a detriment to the other counties of the state". A second change would have tied the amount of exempt valuation added back into a subdivision's debt limit calculation to whatever reimbursement level the Legislature had set.
The resolution passed the House on 25 March and the Senate on 9 April. The Secretary of State numbered it on 13 April and it went to a special election ordered for 25 August.
The turnout tells you who was voting
Both parties held runoff primaries on the same day, and the state questions were open to everyone.
The Republican runoff for governor drew 371,309 votes and was decided by 2,047 of them. Question 844 drew 528,490. Question 846, the other measure on the ballot, drew 535,545 and passed, 292,481 to 243,064. So on one visit to the polls this electorate carried a legislative referendum by 9.2 points and threw out the one next to it by 47.5, which is worth holding on to before anybody reads Tuesday as a mood.
The count is not finished
The State Election Board's own notice on these returns is worth reading before anybody treats them as settled. They are unofficial and unverified. They do not include provisional ballots, which are added after 5 p.m. on Friday, 28 August. County boards may not certify before that hour, and state certification is set for Tuesday, 1 September. Results remain subject to contest and recount until then.
None of which is likely to matter here. The gap is 250,980 votes.
