Many ballots headed for recycle bin

After years of being told their ballot counts, many Washington state voters will have to get used to something else in Tuesday’s primary.

Three out of four ballots they receive won’t count, and instead will be thrown away.

In Spokane County, more than 800,000 ballots will likely be thrown in trash cans or sent to a paper recycling operation if turnout is anywhere near the normal level of about 50 percent of the county’s 234,000 registered voters.

Because of the change in state voting laws, the county printed about 1 million primary ballots – one Republican, one Libertarian, one Democratic and one strictly nonpartisan ballot – for nearly every voter.

Absentee voters, who make up more than half the voter rolls, already have been sent all four ballots in the mail. They must mark the one they want, mail it in by Tuesday, and toss out the other three.

Poll voters will be handed all four ballots when they arrive at the precinct station. They’ll choose the one they want, deposit the other three in a locked bin, and take the remaining ballot to a table to mark their selections.

That’s a change from past years, when all candidates from each party were on a single ballot, and voters could pick one candidate for each position, regardless of party. For Washington state voters, the days of marking a primary ballot for a Democrat for governor, a Republican for attorney general, a Libertarian for the U.S. Senate and a Green Party candidate in the U.S. House ended when federal courts ruled the 1935 law was unconstitutional.

Political parties have the right to an assurance that their nominees for the general election are selected by party members. After months of political maneuvering, Washington wound up with a system similar to those in Idaho and Montana. Voters are limited to one party’s primary ballot, but the parties do not know which ballot anyone casts.

Those who can’t – or won’t – decide which of the three major parties, can cast a nonpartisan ballot for positions like judge and superintendent of public instruction, and any ballot measure. The minor party candidates will appear on the general election ballot

That Nov. 2 election is not affected by the court rulings, and voters can select candidates from any party from a single ballot in the general election.

All primary ballots the county collects – the marked ones from the polls and the mail-in envelopes and the unmarked ones from the receptacles at the polling stations – eventually will be sold to a paper recycler, County Auditor Vicky Dalton said. Because this is an election with federal offices like U.S. Senate and House of Representatives on the ballot, federal law requires keeping them for 22 months.

“What we get back (for the recycled ballots) is minimal,” Dalton said. The county recently was paid $50 for 16,000 pounds of recycled ballots from the 2002 election.