Last year, in both the August Top Two and Novem­ber gen­er­al elec­tions, huge num­bers of Wash­ing­to­ni­ans returned bal­lots, help­ing make the 2020 gen­er­al elec­tion cycle one for the record books. Even the state’s spring pres­i­den­tial pri­ma­ry, held dur­ing the ear­ly days of the pan­dem­ic, set a record.

Now, how­ev­er, with the pres­i­den­tial elec­tion behind us, turnout has regressed to the wor­ri­some lev­els we’ve seen in pre­vi­ous odd-num­bered years going back to 2013. With one day left to cast a bal­lot, vot­er turnout stands at just 17.36% statewide, with 756,092 bal­lots returned out of 4,355,758 issued.

The Sec­re­tary of State’s office recent­ly intro­duced this data visu­al­iza­tion to show bal­lot return sta­tis­tics, built with Microsoft Pow­er Bi. This is a cap­ture of one of the visu­al­iza­tions. Click to enlarge.

The turnout lead­ers are all small coun­ties: Colum­bia and Wahki­akum (which each have only a few hun­dred vot­ers in this elec­tion), fol­lowed by Jef­fer­son, Pacif­ic, San Juan, Stevens, Klick­i­tat, Pend Oreille, Island, and Whit­man. Columbi­a’s turnout is almost 40%; the oth­ers are in the mid-thir­ties or high twenties.

Of the big­ger coun­ties, Kit­sap has the best turnout right now, with 23.09% in. Thurston and What­com have both got­ten over the one-fifth thresh­old, with 20.68% and 20.46%, respec­tive­ly. Spokane is just above the state mean at 17.73%, trailed by Sno­homish and King, with 16.72% and 16.66% each.

Pierce, mean­while, is dead last. The coun­ty, home to the Taco­ma metro area, is the state’s sec­ond most pop­u­lous juris­dic­tion, with 566,782 vot­ers in the elec­tion, but only 65,738 have par­tic­i­pat­ed so far… a cringe­wor­thy rate of 11.60%.

Yaki­ma Coun­ty, which is often last in the state, is sev­er­al spots fur­ther up the list this time, with 15.60%, ahead of Fer­ry, Clark, and Franklin in addi­tion to Pierce.

Past odd year qual­i­fy­ing elec­tions have seen total turnout under 30%. Of the last eight odd-year Top Two elec­tions, only two saw turnout high­er than 30%.

Here’s a table:

Top Two election turnouts: Twenty-first century odd years

Turnout data for Sep­tem­ber 2001 and Sep­tem­ber 2003 is unfor­tu­nate­ly not read­i­ly avail­able, not even in the Sec­re­tary of State’s pub­lished archives

The above are statewide numbers.

King Coun­ty Elec­tions pro­ject­ed that 2021 Top Two turnout with­in the state’s largest coun­ty would reach forty per­cent. As I told KIRO FM, I don’t see us get­ting there in this elec­tion. I would love to be wrong, but that would require a turnout boom tomor­row. We’d have to more than dou­ble our return rate in twen­ty-four hours. Is that pos­si­ble? Absolute­ly! But more of us would have to vote.

A lot more.

If, like the NPI team, you’ve returned your bal­lot, then it’s time to check on fam­i­ly and friends to see if they have returned theirs. Chances are that they haven’t, because few­er than one in five vot­ers has got­ten a bal­lot back to the thir­ty-sev­en coun­ties that have offices and mea­sures on the August Top Two ballot.

It is worth not­ing that even before we had a Top Two, in the days of the old blan­ket pri­ma­ry held in Sep­tem­ber, turnout was still pret­ty lousy in odd-num­bered years. That sug­gests that it’s not the month that mat­ters (e.g. August ver­sus Sep­tem­ber or anoth­er month) but rather, the year.

Far few­er vot­ers engage and par­tic­i­pate in odd-num­bered years, which is when Wash­ing­ton State law pre­scribes that cities have their elec­tions (and when home rule coun­ties like King Coun­ty choose to have their coun­ty elections.)

We have fifty years of data to inform our con­clu­sions about vot­er behav­ior, since the state’s expand­ed exper­i­ment with odd year elec­tions began in the 1970s.

Turnout varies in even-num­bered years too, of course, but it’s con­sis­tent­ly above fifty per­cent in gen­er­al elec­tions, which is an impor­tant threshold.

Last year, gen­er­al elec­tion turnout was an impres­sive 84.11%, bet­ter than almost any­where else, while August Top Two turnout was 54.44%.

Turnout this year could eas­i­ly be less than half that.

When turnout is above fifty per­cent, it means that a major­i­ty of peo­ple who were reg­is­tered to vote sent back a bal­lot. Elec­tions gen­er­al­ly do not have a quo­rum require­ment, with the excep­tion of min­i­mum turnout require­ments for bond mea­sures, but maybe they should. In a democ­ra­cy, deci­sions are sup­posed to be made by the many, not a few. Yet when hard­ly any­one votes, the deci­sions about who gov­erns end up get­ting made by a very small per­cent­age of the voters.

There’s a sim­ple solu­tion for imme­di­ate­ly improv­ing turnout in local elec­tions: move them to even num­bered years when state and fed­er­al posi­tions are also on the bal­lot. Most coun­ties actu­al­ly already hold their coun­ty-lev­el elec­tions in even-num­bered years — it’s only home rule coun­ties like King, Sno­homish, and What­com that don’t. As cities and coun­ties are our most impor­tant local gov­ern­ments, mov­ing their elec­tions to even num­bered years seems like a good start­ing point, along with phas­ing out state-lev­el elec­tions in odd-num­bered years.