Good news: Washington State seeing highest August electoral voter turnout since 2012

After spi­ral­ing down­ward across elec­tions for more half a decade, vot­er turnout in Wash­ing­ton State is final­ly on the rise, thanks in part to the removal of bar­ri­ers to vot­ing and thanks in part to the resis­tance and back­lash to Don­ald Trump’s regime.

As of this morn­ing, vot­er turnout in the August 2018 Top Two elec­tion stood at 38.45%, a lev­el of par­tic­i­pa­tion not seen since 2012, when Barack Oba­ma was the Demo­c­ra­t­ic Par­ty’s nom­i­nee for Pres­i­dent for the sec­ond time.

An esti­mat­ed 78,587 bal­lots remain left to be count­ed, which means the per­cent­age will go high­er before the elec­tion is cer­ti­fied a week from this Tues­day. If all the remain­ing esti­mat­ed bal­lots are count­ed, turnout will climb above 40%.

And that would put us above the mark set in 2012.

Sur­pass­ing 40% would also be a nice sym­bol­ic accom­plish­ment. The last time we saw August turnout that high was eight years ago, dur­ing the 2010 midterms.

Thanks to King Coun­ty’s lead­er­ship, this elec­tion is the first in which every Wash­ing­ton vot­er was pro­vid­ed with pre­paid postage on their bal­lot return envelopes. Stamps are no longer need­ed to return a bal­lot through the mail, which means that every post office is now effec­tive­ly a bal­lot drop box.

Mean­while, the num­ber of drop box­es has also been increased as a con­se­quence of leg­is­la­tion approved last year. It’s nev­er been eas­i­er to return a ballot.

The turnout we’re see­ing in this elec­tion is evi­dence that remov­ing bar­ri­ers to vot­ing can have a pos­i­tive effect on turnout.

Next year, more of the Access to Democ­ra­cy bills are set to be imple­ment­ed, includ­ing auto­mat­ic, pre, and same day vot­er reg­is­tra­tion. These much need­ed changes will hope­ful­ly con­tin­ue to lift turnout.

Here’s the per­cent­ages for every August Top Two elec­tion, going back ten years:

• 2018 Top Two (in progress): 38.45%
• 2017 Top Two (local year): 26.92%
• 2016 Top Two (pres­i­den­tial year): 34.88%
• 2015 Top Two (local year): 24.37%
• 2014 Top Two (midterm year): 31.15%
• 2013 Top Two (local year): 25.99%
• 2012 Top Two (pres­i­den­tial year): 38.48%
• 2011 Top Two (local year): 29.54%
• 2010 Top Two (midterm year): 40.97%
• 2009 Top Two (local year): 31.04%
• 2008 Top Two (pres­i­den­tial year): 42.60%

Pri­or to 2008, Wash­ing­ton held an open pri­ma­ry (also called a pick a par­ty pri­ma­ry) as its pre­lim­i­nary elec­tion, in which vot­ers chose nom­i­nees for par­ti­san offices.

Here are the same Top Two per­cent­ages plot­ted on a chart:

The “moun­tains” in the chart are pres­i­den­tial and midterm elec­tion years; the “val­leys” are local elec­tion years. Notice that even in the even-num­bered years, turnout was on a down­ward tra­jec­to­ry. 2016 had worse turnout than 2012, for exam­ple, and 2014 had worse turnout than 2010.

When mak­ing com­par­isons, it is best to com­pare apples to apples, oranges to oranges, bananas to bananas, and so on. So when we’re look­ing at turnout, the most sim­i­lar elec­tion is the one held four years ago in an equiv­a­lent cycle.

There are nine main elec­tion types, not count­ing spe­cial elec­tions in April and Feb­ru­ary: a pre­lim­i­nary and a gen­er­al elec­tion cor­re­spond­ing to each year in a four year cycle (pres­i­den­tial, local, midterm, local) and the pres­i­den­tial primary.

By our reck­on­ing, this is only the sec­ond elec­tion in six years in which turnout has climbed above a pre­ced­ing elec­tion of the same type.

The first to buck the falling turnout trend was last year’s Top Two elec­tion, which had slight­ly high­er turnout (26.92%) than its 2013 pre­de­ces­sor (25.99%).

As we can see, the 2017 Novem­ber gen­er­al elec­tion sad­ly did not buck the trend.

Turnout in that elec­tion — which was a piti­ful 37.10% — igno­min­ious­ly became the worst in state his­to­ry. More vot­ers have already vot­ed in this Top Two elec­tion than vot­ed in last Novem­ber’s gen­er­al elec­tion, which real­ly says some­thing, because those are dif­fer­ent types of elec­tions and not direct­ly comparable!

There’s more we can do to make vot­ing eas­i­er and encour­age peo­ple to vote, but we can be proud of the steps we’ve already tak­en. Unlike right wing dom­i­nat­ed states, we are work­ing to expand suf­frage and par­tic­i­pa­tion instead of con­strict it.