Heads up: King County Elections will be counting ballots *around the clock* this year

Since the advent of vote by mail in Wash­ing­ton State’s largest coun­ty sev­er­al years ago, jour­nal­ists, activists, and cit­i­zens around these parts have become accus­tomed to a King Coun­ty Elec­tions results sched­ule that looks like this:

• Elec­tion Night: 8:15 PM results drop
• Sub­se­quent days: Addi­tion­al results post­ed around 4 or 4:30 PM

But this year, things are going to be dif­fer­ent. Very different.

Deter­mined to speed up the pro­cess­ing of bal­lots, King Coun­ty Elec­tions has added a night shift, and plans to release fresh num­bers in the mid­dle of the night, every night, for the next sev­er­al days. This is the post­ing sched­ule for this year:

• Elec­tion Night, 8:15 PM: First results drop
• Wednes­day, 1:30 AM: Sec­ond results drop
• Wednes­day, 3:30 PM: Third results drop
• Thurs­day, 3:30 AM: Fourth results drop

Yes, you read that cor­rect­ly… King Coun­ty Elec­tions plans to release new num­bers at 3:30 AM — as in the mid­dle of the night — every day start­ing Thurs­day, Novem­ber 10th, and end­ing Sun­day, Novem­ber 13th.

They are not stop­ping for Vet­er­ans Day or the week­end. They will be count­ing around the clock until we get to Sun­day. The pace will slow after that, but there will still be dai­ly releas­es up until Thanks­giv­ing hits.

There­after, the plan is for there to be one results post­ing a day at 3:30 PM. That changes to 5:30 PM once we get to Thanks­giv­ing week.

You can see the cal­en­dar for your­self here.

So, for the next few days, you can expect fresh num­bers to already be avail­able out of King Coun­ty when you wake up, due to the night shift and the new twen­ty-four hour oper­a­tions King Coun­ty has instituted.

Clear­ly, man­age­ment at King Coun­ty Elec­tions does­n’t want to be a lag­gard in this elec­tion. They have been antic­i­pat­ing a huge vol­ume of bal­lots, and they have obtained funds from the King Coun­ty Coun­cil to work around the clock so that the pile of unprocessed bal­lots does­n’t get out of hand. As a con­se­quence, results watch­ing is going to feel very, very dif­fer­ent here than it has in years past.

Pierce Coun­ty Elec­tions also plans a Wednes­day AM release, though not in the mid­dle of the night. They’ll drop fresh num­bers at 9:30 AM tomorrow.