With a little help from my friends at the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, I’ve got an update to Monday’s post on education initiatives, An awful lot of bad ideas were stopped by the voters.

Amendment 39, the First Class Education/ 65% funding mandate, was sent packing in Colorado. The proposal has gotten just 38% of the vote so far. Nevada’s Question 1 passed, and now the legislature will have to fund education before they fund anything else. But this isn’t likely to actually improve education funding.

The voters also excercised a lot of caution on education spending. The Califonrnia bond initiative and the Arizona tobacco tax passed, but the sales tax increase in Idaho, the land trust reform in Arizona and the Michigan education funding proposal all failed.

Both my predictions about initiatives were wrong. Voters rejected the Nebraska initiative to require a referendum before a school district could be consolidated and South Dakota voters defeated a referendum that would have prevented the school year from beginning before August 31. And Arizona Prop 300, which would limit illegal immigrants’ use of subsidies for public education and childcare was passed by a wide margin (72-28).

TABOR was indeed defeated soundly in Nebraksa, Oregon and Maine. The TABOR folks succeeded in passing their "regulatory takings" initiative in Arizona, but were pushed back in California, Idaho and Washington. And, in Washington state, an effort to repeal the estate tax was defeated handily (62-37). This is a win that has very important consequences for discussions about how to deal with the federal estate tax.

And, moving off of education and public finance, each initiative to raise the minimum wage was successful. My congratulations to the people who just got a raise in Montana, Ohio, Missouri, Arizona, Colorado and Nevada.