After years in federal courts and months of transcription, WhoSigned.Org went live this afternoon with a searchable database that includes the names and addresses of people who signed Referendum 71 in 2009. The referendum petition, circulated by anti-gay activists with the group Protect Marriage Washington, was an attempt to overturn Washington State's domestic partnership law that granted same-sex couples the same state rights as marriage.
WhoSigned.Org went all the way to the Supreme Court to uphold the state's open records law, and backers say they posted the data to help weed out any potential voter fraud and facilitate conversations with anti-gay R-71 signers. Some of the data may be incomplete, I'm told, because some handwriting couldn't be fully transcribed.
