Primary Election Deadline Day Is Tomorrow

Fill Out and Turn in Your Ballot! Call Your Friends. It’s Time to Participate.

This email was also published yesterday, so if you read it then there is no need to read it today—except, perhaps for the asterisk at the bottom (which is new).

According to the Spokane County Elections webpage as of last Friday, July 29th at 2:30 PM, only 68,204 (19.05%) of the 357,994 ballots that were mailed out to active* registered voters in Spokane County had been filled out, received, and accepted at the County Elections Office. That’s pretty dismal. Ballots have been in the hands of the voters for two weeks—and only 1 in 5 of us voters have done our homework.

Let’s look at the (somewhat twisted) bright side: the lower the ballot turn-in number the more each of our votes counts (proportionally) in the outcome. Do your own homework and then make it your business today to call at least five of your friends and remind them to vote their Primary ballot and either get it postmarked or, better, deposit it in a Drop Box by 8 PM Tuesday, August 2nd. (For a list of Spokane County’s active Drop Boxes click here. There are some new ones and a couple of currently “closed” Drop Boxes listed. Don’t find yourself at a closed Drop Box site at 7:59PM Tuesday.)

If you’ve already sent in your ballot, check to see that it has been received and accepted (that is it passed the signature verification step), but signing in at vote.wa.gov and clicking “Ballot Status” under “My Ballot”.

Need more information? I published (and discussed) a number of get-to-know-the-candidates voter guides in last Friday’s email. Click here to go back to that post. One addition: I think a good argument can be made for the position of Secretary of State to be non-partisan. The only non-partisan candidate for Secretary of State is Julie Anderson, currently the Pierce County Auditor. Especially for any middle-of-the-road or Republican friends you might urge to vote today, suggest they check out Ms. Anderson’s interview with Kent Adams from July 27 on “Spokane Talks”. The interview is just 18 minutes long. Judging by multiple Republican ads that follow the interview (ads that I presume are also torturing TV watchers these days), Mr. Adams’ audience leans Republican. The interview is a great civics review of the job of Washington’s Secretary of State. Ms. Anderson makes a compelling argument both for her expertise and for her non-partisan stance, an argument that ought to appeal to sane voters of all parties.

Keep to the high ground,

Jerry

*Given the national news about partisan purging of voters who haven’t turned in a ballot for a few years I wondered exactly what the term “active” in “active registered voters” was defined. I emailed the Elections office to ask what constitutes an inactive registered voter. I received (on the weekend) the following reassuring reply from Spokane County Auditor Vicky Dalton:

An “active voter” is a registration record that will be mailed a ballot. If we receive a notice that the address is not current or that the voter has moved, then the record is flagged “inactive” and ballots will no longer be mailed until the voter (or official agency like USPS) updates their info. Notices could be a returned ballot packet by the USPS marked undeliverable or no longer at this address, a forwarding address from USPS, notification from Department of Licensing of a Driver’s License surrender and so on.