It Ain't Over, Folks. . . .

Although the mid-term elections took place a month ago, and Oregonians had begun to mail and turn in their votes as much as two weeks prior to that, the election results on Measure 92 -- the GMO labeling proposal I wrote about here on October 28 -- are not yet final.

As of Nov. 6, the measure appeared to have been defeated by about 10,500 votes. That’s a slim margin: out of nearly 1.4 million votes cast, the difference amounted to 50.4 percent “no” to 49.6 percent “yes.” Nonetheless, the Oregonian pronounced defeat for the GMO labeling effort.

But the results turned out to be much closer.

A sizable chunk of votes had not been properly signed. For our U.S. neighbors who don’t enjoy the luxury of vote-by-mail (and that’s still most of you, at this point), once you’ve filled in your ballot, you can place it in an optional “privacy envelope” -- with big air holes so your check marks can breathe, I suppose -- and then in a slightly larger, preaddressed envelope that has a line on the back where you’re supposed to sign your name.

The votes inside are not counted as valid if there’s no signature on the outer envelope. Roughly 13,000 Oregon voters failed to sign their envelope in this election. In the past, those votes were simply not counted, period; but a new state law allows election officials and campaigns to obtain the names of the people whose votes were thus invalidated so they could be contacted to correct the error.

When the first-round count was completed, Measure 92 had been defeated by only 812 votes out 1.5 million! That’s a difference of just five hundredths of a percent. By law, such a slim margin requires an automatic recount, which began this week. Election officials in Oregon’s 36 counties have until Dec. 12 to complete the recount.

I have not seen any reporting on how many of those “one-percenters” -- the folks who failed to sign their vote envelopes -- have rectified that problem. But one percent is ’way more than the five-hundredths difference in the Measure 92 results. Fewer than one in ten who voted “yes” could validate their ballot and change the result of the election.

As of this morning, recounts are in from the small, sparsely populated counties, and there hasn’t been much change: in fact, the “no” side appears to have gained five votes. On the other hand, those small, sparsely populated counties are more likely to have gone in the “no” direction, as opposed to the large and liberal population centers in Lane County (Eugene and the University of Oregon) and Multnomah County (metro Portland, where I live).

In this instance, the one exception to the liberal Willamette Valley metro areas versus the conservative rural counties across the rest of the state was Jackson County, a largely rural and typically conservative area on the Interstate-5 corridor next to the California border that pulled the surprising move of voting to ban GMO crop farming last spring. (Much of the push for the measure probably originated in the blazingly liberal town of Ashland, home of the Oregon Shakespeare Festival as well as my mother and middle brother, but the local farmers were also mostly in favor of the measure, too, since many of their customers prefer to buy non-chemical, organic produce.)

Personally, I don’t hold out much hope for Measure 92 to win on the recount. But I won’t be terribly disappointed if it fails. When you consider the bigger picture, this near-miss qualifies as a big win for the organic food/environmentalist side.

For one thing, as I mentioned in my Oct. 28 piece, similar efforts to require GMO labeling went down to defeat much more soundly in Colorado, California, and Washington after opposition from the likes of Monsanto, Coca-Cola, and DuPont poured multiple millions of dollars into killing them.

Similarly, the campaign over Measure 92 was the most expensive ballot measure race in the history of our state: the $30 million ($21 million against, $9 million for) poured into it here doesn’t top the $45 million spent in Colorado, but it’s a mind-blowing chunk o’ change, nonetheless.

That the results were much closer this time, in a state that’s typically more conservative than Washington, California, and sometimes Colorado, suggests to me that the tide is shifting on GMOs, just as it did with recreational marijuana and same-sex marriage. Vermont has approved labels, and genetically modified foods require labeling in 64 nations around the world.

In this November election, the Hawaiian island of Maui passed a ban on GMO farming, though Monsanto and Dow Chemical immediately filed a lawsuit to block the new law. Monsanto and Dow do much of of their development of new seed crops in Maui because the warm weather allows faster, multiple planting cycles per year.

That Monsanto and DuPont prefer to spend millions on misleading advertising to defeat ballot measure after ballot measure, in state after state, rather than on scientific research that would prove, or at least strongly suggest, that some genetic modification of food and food materials is harmless to humans and animals, means that they either know better, aren’t sure, or mistrust their ability to reason with American consumers.

None of these alternatives sounds very savory to me. I predict these corporations have an uphill battle ahead of them on this issue.