Washington’s general election voter turnout is about as low as in other recent odd years

Last year, Wash­ing­to­ni­ans vot­ed for elec­tors for Pres­i­dent, Vice Pres­i­dent, nine statewide offices, and even more down­bal­lot races in near-record num­bers, with statewide turnout sur­pass­ing 80%. This year, how­ev­er, we appear set to regress to a per­cent­age typ­i­cal for recent odd-num­bered local elec­tion cycles, which is to say that turnout prob­a­bly isn’t going to get above the low forties.

As of this morn­ing, statewide turnout stood at 16.7%, slight­ly above the 16% mark at this same junc­ture in 2017, which was the year that we saw the worst gen­er­al elec­tion turnout in state his­to­ry, but worse than 2019, when turnout as of the morn­ing before Elec­tion Day was 19.4%.

How­ev­er, it’s impor­tant to note that these statewide fig­ures don’t reflect the lat­est num­bers from King Coun­ty. The most recent state data for King Coun­ty stops at 10/29/2021 (Fri­day), but King Coun­ty Elec­tions actu­al­ly updat­ed its bal­lot return sta­tis­tics just last night, so the num­bers for the state’s largest sub­di­vi­sion have changed and are not yet reflect­ed in the state’s compilation.

On Fri­day, King Coun­ty turnout stood at 15.48%. How­ev­er, as of sun­set on Hal­loween, it was 16.30%, with 227,887 bal­lots returned and 1,398,046 active reg­is­tered vot­ers. Seat­tle turnout is a bit high­er than the coun­ty as a whole, with 19.55% in. How­ev­er, oth­er cities are see­ing high­er turnout, includ­ing Mer­cer Island (22.69%), Med­i­na (21.80%), and Nor­mandy Park (20.55%).

Like in past years, small coun­ties such as Colum­bia and Jef­fer­son have the high­est rates of return. Colum­bia has 35.3% of bal­lots in, fol­lowed by Jef­fer­son at 28.8%. Stevens is third with 26.7%, Chelan is fourth with 26.6%, and Garfield is fifth with 26.2%. All of these coun­ties have small­er pop­u­la­tions than indi­vid­ual medi­um-sized cities like Red­mond and Kirk­land in King County.

Of the more pop­u­lous coun­ties (defined for the pur­pos­es of this post as coun­ties with over 100,000 vot­ers), What­com is the turnout leader at 20.3% in, trailed by Spokane (20.2%) and Thurston (20.1%). Then it’s Kit­sap with 19.5% in and Ben­ton with 18.5% in. King Coun­ty is behind those five, but it’s ahead of its neigh­bors Sno­homish and Pierce, with have 14.7% and 12.4%, respectively.

Pierce’s 12.4% turnout is the worst in the state right now, even worse than Yaki­ma, which can often be found at the bot­tom of the list of the state’s list of thir­ty-nine coun­ties with respect to turnout. Wor­ry­ing­ly, Pierce has increas­ing­ly been a turnout lag­gard in recent odd-num­bered elec­tion cycles. It is the state’s sec­ond largest sub­di­vi­sion, with over half a mil­lion voters.

If, like us, you’d like to see our turnout num­bers go high­er, then make calls and send texts to peo­ple you know to remind them about the election.

As I wrote in 2019:

There are no “off” years… every elec­tion year is an “on” year… so ban­ish that term from your vocab­u­lary and make sure peo­ple you know have voted.

We are blessed to live in a demo­c­ra­t­ic repub­lic where we get to choose our lead­ers as opposed to an author­i­tar­i­an regime where we have no voice and no vote in our gov­er­nance. Vot­ing is an impor­tant oblig­a­tion of citizenship.

There are no accept­able excus­es for not vot­ing, espe­cial­ly not when three weeks are pro­vid­ed to fill out and return bal­lots, which is the case here in Washington.

So please: Talk to your col­leagues, fam­i­ly, and friends about tomorrow’s elec­tion. Ask them if they’ve vot­ed. If they have, thank them.

And if they haven’t, offer to help them make a plan for vot­ing. Research shows that peo­ple are more like­ly to vote when they make a plan to vote.