Last week, the League of Women Vot­ers of Seat­tle and King Coun­ty held a well-attend­ed debate between the two can­di­dates run­ning for Sec­re­tary of State this year — Repub­li­can incum­bent Kim Wyman and Demo­c­ra­t­ic chal­lenger Tina Pod­lodows­ki. A key top­ic dis­cussed at the debate was what to do about vot­er turnout in Wash­ing­ton State, which has been declin­ing for years.

Here’s what the can­di­dates had to say, in their own words:

QUESTION: Next top­ic: Vot­er turnout. How would you increase vot­er turnout in our state?

TINA PODLODOWSKI: So vot­er turnout has been going down steadi­ly under the cur­rent Sec­re­tary of State — every year for the last four years she’s been in office. Some­times in look­ing at it, you com­pare it to the pri­or four year elec­tion, you look at sev­en­teen per­cent declines, four­teen per­cent declines, nine per­cent declines… How do you change that? You do a cou­ple of things. Num­ber one is the big pol­i­cy issues. Auto­mat­ic vot­er reg­is­tra­tion. Same-day reg­is­tra­tion. Pre­reg­is­tra­tion for six­teen and sev­en­teen year olds. And postage free bal­lots, which hope­ful­ly we’ll talk about more because of what’s hap­pen­ing in Sno­homish Coun­ty today. Also, you need to do the work with coun­ty audi­tors, but also on the ground with good gov­ern­men­tal orga­ni­za­tions and non­prof­it orga­ni­za­tions in com­mu­ni­ties. That’s why you do that thir­ty-nine coun­ty audit. That’s why you have the num­bers that show where are the prob­lems. Is it with young peo­ple in the coun­ty? Is it par­tic­u­lar com­mu­ni­ties of col­or? Is it a par­tic­u­lar gen­der that’s hav­ing issues get­ting to the bal­lot box? You need to do that work and craft a strat­e­gy through the Depart­ment of Vot­er Engage­ment — that’s what my group would be called as Sec­re­tary of State, to make sure there’s a plan to get that done.

KIM WYMAN: So, when we’re talk­ing about vot­er turnout, let’s go back to manip­u­lat­ing data. It was brought up by The Olympian and The News Tri­bune that… that when you just make that com­par­i­son and you cher­ry pick elec­tions and you com­pare ’em, you can make some real­ly inflam­ma­to­ry assump­tions about turnout. But when you actu­al­ly com­pare what turnout is… Turnout real­ly is a func­tion of what’s on the bal­lot. And when we look at pres­i­den­tial years, it’s [the] high­est turnout year… Midterms fol­low sec­ond, and then the odd-year pri­maries and gen­er­als are the low­est turnout. And so, when you look at Wash­ing­ton State… in 2010, we had real­ly high turnout, because we had real­ly inflam­ma­to­ry issues on the bal­lot that had peo­ple fired up about tax­a­tion. So, what I’ve always tried to do, as Coun­ty Audi­tor and now as Sec­re­tary of State, is to do things that real­ly empow­er peo­ple to get their bal­lot in eas­i­ly. We were the first coun­ty in the state to have drop box­es, for exam­ple. When I left Thurston Coun­ty, we had more drop box­es than King Coun­ty did at the time, and we were a tenth of the size of King Coun­ty. So it’s about inno­v­a­tive ideas. 

I was present at the debate and found Wyman’s answer to the turnout ques­tion very dis­ap­point­ing and puz­zling. If inflam­ma­to­ry tax ini­tia­tives dri­ve turnout, then the pres­ence of Tim Eyman’s con­tro­ver­sial and incred­i­bly destruc­tive I‑1366 on the bal­lot last year ought to have helped moti­vate peo­ple to return their ballots.

Instead, we saw the worst gen­er­al elec­tion turnout in the his­to­ry of the State of Wash­ing­ton. Yes, you read that cor­rect­ly… the worst gen­er­al turnout ever!

What’s on the bal­lot can influ­ence turnout — but it’s hard­ly the only factor.

You’d think our incum­bent Sec­re­tary of State would be alarmed at the down­ward spi­ral we have been see­ing with vot­er turnout — a trend I doc­u­ment­ed last month here on the Cas­ca­dia Advo­cate. But Wyman does­n’t seem to want to acknowl­edge that the prob­lem exists, let alone offer solu­tions to address it.

Tina Pod­lodows­ki is cor­rect when she says vot­er turnout is declin­ing, but she con­tin­ues to be crit­i­cized by reporters for a video and a graph her cam­paign pre­vi­ous­ly pub­lished that don’t dis­tin­guish between dif­fer­ent types of elections.

“Pod­lodows­ki paints a mis­lead­ing pic­ture, com­par­ing turnouts from elec­tions that have lit­tle in com­mon,” was how The Seat­tle Times’ David Gut­man char­ac­ter­ized it yes­ter­day in a sto­ry for the state’s news­pa­per of record.

Con­text does mat­ter, but what the data shows is that every statewide elec­tion that has been held dur­ing Kim Wyman’s tenure as Sec­re­tary of State has seen low­er turnout than the com­pa­ra­ble elec­tion four or eight years pri­or. There’s not even one elec­tion that’s bucked the trend. Some­times the declines are slight, and some­times they’re steep. But turnout is declin­ing across the board. That’s a fact.

To illus­trate this point, here is a brand new chart, cre­at­ed by NPI, that com­pares vot­er turnout in sim­i­lar elec­tions in Wash­ing­ton State. And by that, I mean that pres­i­den­tial year gen­er­al elec­tions are being com­pared to pre­vi­ous pres­i­den­tial year gen­er­al elec­tions, midterms to midterms, local elec­tions to local elec­tions, and so on. There are a total of nine dif­fer­ent elec­tion types being com­pared in this chart, and the data points for each type are plot­ted on their own line. The chart shows data going back twen­ty years in an attempt to offer mean­ing­ful context.

Some notes:

• The first elec­tion in the chart is the Sep­tem­ber 1996 pri­ma­ry elec­tion, held in a pres­i­den­tial year. The last is the August 2016 Top Two election.
• The fig­ures used for the com­par­isons here are per­cent­ages — specif­i­cal­ly, the per­cent­age of reg­is­tered vot­ers who returned bal­lots in each election.
• All per­cent­ages were pro­vid­ed by data pub­lished online or sent to NPI by the Sec­re­tary of State’s office.
• There are two types of local elec­tion years: those that fol­low a pres­i­den­tial year and those that pre­cede one. Local elec­tions that fol­low a pres­i­den­tial elec­tion are clas­si­fied as “Local Year A” and those that pre­cede as “Local Year B”. Because many local posi­tions are for four year terms, Local Year A elec­tions are most sim­i­lar to oth­er Local Year A elec­tions, and vice versa.
• Each line, with two excep­tions, con­tains a data point every four years, or, in the case of the pres­i­den­tial pri­ma­ry, every eight years.
• Data points for the 2001 and 2003 blan­ket pri­maries aren’t includ­ed because the Sec­re­tary of State does not have com­plete statewide num­bers for them.

Notice how every line — every line — is present­ly point­ed down­ward. Again, across the board, look­ing at every type of elec­tion, turnout is head­ed in the wrong direc­tion. That is true even so far this year — and this is a pres­i­den­tial elec­tion year!

Now, as I said in my pre­vi­ous post, Kim Wyman did­n’t cause this alarm­ing trend. But she isn’t doing any­thing to arrest it or reverse it. And she should be.

Gut­man and his edi­tors at the Times opt­ed not to do a deep dive into Wash­ing­ton’s turnout data for the sto­ry they ran yes­ter­day. For con­text and com­men­tary, they turned to a pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Flori­da, who rein­forced and repeat­ed Wyman’s excus­es for the state’s recent poor turnout.

“I didn’t fault Wash­ing­ton at all for hav­ing a low turnout; peo­ple have to have a rea­son to vote,” said Michael McDon­ald, a pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Flori­da who runs the U.S. Elec­tions Project that tracks his­tor­i­cal elec­tion data. “If there aren’t par­tic­u­lar­ly com­pet­i­tive races at the top of the bal­lot, that’s going to dri­ve turnout much more than some of these changes.”

Elec­tions are most­ly not com­pa­ra­ble to one anoth­er; turnout in pres­i­den­tial years is high­er than in midterm years, which, in turn, are high­er than in off-year elec­tions. Even among sim­i­lar elec­tions, turnout varies based on fac­tors like whether there’s a com­pet­i­tive U.S. Sen­ate or guber­na­to­r­i­al race on the bal­lot, or a high-pro­file initiative.

But turnout in off-year elec­tions (held in odd-num­bered years) has declined since 2011, set­ting a record-low last year. Turnout statewide dropped from 53 per­cent in 2011, to 45 per­cent in 2013 and 39 per­cent last year. Wyman says that’s part of a nation­al trend. She said Wash­ing­ton still had high­er turnouts than most places.

“You guys are doing pret­ty good on turnout,” McDon­ald said. “You could be doing bet­ter, but you’re doing pret­ty good.”

We dis­agree with Pro­fes­sor McDon­ald. Wash­ing­ton is not doing “pret­ty good” with respect to vot­er turnout. Out­side of the last two pres­i­den­tial elec­tions — the only recent elec­tions we’d char­ac­ter­ize as “pret­ty good” — Wash­ing­ton’s  turnout late­ly has ranged from okay to mediocre to his­tor­i­cal­ly abysmal.

When less than a major­i­ty of the reg­is­tered vot­ers are vot­ing, par­tic­u­lar­ly in a gen­er­al elec­tion, it means laws are being made and office­hold­ers elect­ed by the few, not the many. That’s unhealthy for a democ­ra­cy. That’s not some­thing we should accept. We should have high stan­dards for ourselves.

Part of the prob­lem we have stems from how we talk and think about elec­tions. Case in point: There is no such thing as an “off year” elec­tion, there are only “on” years. In Wash­ing­ton, every year is cur­rent­ly an elec­tion year and every elec­tion mat­ters. “Off year elec­tion” needs to be ban­ished from every­one’s vocabulary.

Incum­bent Sec­re­tary of State Kim Wyman has a respon­si­bil­i­ty to sound the alarm about our turnout prob­lem and pro­pose solu­tions to address it. Instead, she keeps try­ing to make it sound like the trend is some­thing she has no con­trol over. Wash­ing­ton is not immune to nation­al trends, to be sure, but if there’s a bad trend affect­ing the whole coun­try, then we want to be buck­ing that trend.

Par­tic­i­pa­tion in demo­c­ra­t­ic elec­tions is not some kind of nat­ur­al force like the tides. It is with­in our pow­er to bol­ster turnout, and one way to do that is to elim­i­nate bar­ri­ers to vot­ing. We ought to have more drop box­es, pre­paid postage on bal­lots, auto­mat­ic vot­er reg­is­tra­tion, and same day reg­is­tra­tion, for instance.

Those are reforms Tina Pod­lodows­ki embraces. Kim Wyman? Sad­ly, not so much. They’re sim­ply not part of the vision she has out­lined for the next four years.