Niki Reading of TVW has a Q&A with Washington Secretary of State Sam Reed today in which Reed shed some light on the murky question of what will happen if both I-1100 and I-1105, the dueling liquor-privatization initiatives, pass. State law, Reed said, mandates that if two similar initiatives pass, the one that gets the most votes wins.

But, Reed added, there's a wrinkle: The two proposals include some conflicting language. "Say one gets more votes but the other has some language the one that got the most votes didn’t have – then that would be included," Reed said. "In other words, this is going to give the attorneys a lot of fun."

Incidentally, there's a local precedent for this conundrum: Backs in 1998,  activists proposed a measure that would have competed with the Libraries for All property-tax levy. Although the rival measure ultimately  failed to make it on to the ballot, if it had, the same rules—the measure that gets the most votes wins—would have applied.