Today is Election Day in Washington; time to vote NO on I‑517 and YES on I‑522

The big day is final­ly upon us! Today is Tues­day, Novem­ber 5th… Elec­tion Day, also known as the last day you can do your civic duty and vote. Tonight we’ll begin to have some idea of who will be gov­ern­ing cities, ports, schools, and coun­ties across Wash­ing­ton State for the next few years (not to men­tion spe­cial districts).

Regard­less of where you live in Wash­ing­ton, there are two statewide ini­tia­tives to vote on, plus five “advi­so­ry votes” that we’re now refer­ring to as Tim Eyman’s push polls. Chances are, you prob­a­bly have a num­ber of local races on your bal­lot too.

If you have already returned your bal­lot, that’s great… thank you for par­tic­i­pat­ing and doing your civic duty! If you haven’t, please plan on tak­ing your bal­lot to the post office or a drop box before tomor­row evening. King Coun­ty Elec­tions has a list of return loca­tions on its web­site. So do these oth­er counties:

• Sno­homish
• Pierce
• Kit­sap
• What­com

If you need help vot­ing on the bal­lot mea­sures, vis­it NPI’s BallotGuide.info. It pro­vides an illus­trat­ed guide to what’s on the front side of your ballot.

We urge you to vote NO on Tim Eyman’s I‑517 and YES on Ini­tia­tive 522, which would require that foods pro­duced with genet­ic engi­neer­ing be labeled.

The dead­line to return bal­lots is eight o’clock tonight across the state. Make sure you get your bal­lot to a drop box before then.

If you’re plan­ning on mail­ing your bal­lot from a Unit­ed States Post Office, be aware that the last out­go­ing mail col­lec­tion times may be soon­er than this!

Tonight, we will have results for all of the hot races on Pacif­ic NW Por­tal in a real­ly cool, easy to nav­i­gate grid lay­out. The results web­sites oper­at­ed by King Coun­ty and the Sec­re­tary of State unfor­tu­nate­ly make you do a lot of click­ing to see results for dif­fer­ent races. We take a dif­fer­ent approach. We put results for all of the hot races on one page, so you can see what’s going on around the state.

We will also have elec­tion night head­lines from Vir­ginia, New York, and oth­er places. (New York is elect­ing a new may­or, while Vir­ginia is choos­ing its next governor).

Our live elec­tions cov­er­age will start around 7:30 PM. Results should be avail­able short­ly after 8 PM. Sim­ply browse to Pacif­ic NW Por­tal around that time, and you’ll find results, analy­sis, and live cov­er­age from our board, staff, and contributors.

We hope you find our cov­er­age use­ful and informative.