Primary turnout was higher than many expected

The primary has been over for more than a week, but there are still some interesting things we are learning as the absentees are counted and certified.

One is the turnout was much better than elections officials predicted.

State turnout stands at about 44 percent, and Spokane County turnout a smidge under 47 percent. This for the first election after the collective villains did away with what some groups refer to as our “beloved” blanket primary.

State Democratic officials were complaining loudly last week that Secretary of State Sam Reed, who is, not coincidentally, a Republican and no fan of the system he is required by law to administer, was deliberately low-balling turnout predictions in the days leading up to the primary.

But that seems to ignore that political experts (who admittedly are wrong more often than right) and many candidates of various partisan stripes were also predicting low turnout. GOP Senate candidate Reed Davis was even pinning his hopes on it as the days wound down to Sept. 14.

And if Reed can be suspected for his support of the Nov. 2 initiative to change to yet another system, state Ds are not exactly driven-snow pure here. They helped bring us the system we got stuck with this time around by joining the lawsuit, and they don’t support the new initiative.

They also haven’t produced many glowing testimonials of the Montana system that was used in the primary, also know as Get Four, Pick One (Throw Away Three).

Just squeaking by

Also from the final numbers we are learning that the Libertarian Party may have chosen the wrong side when it joined the lawsuit against the old blanket primary.

Libertarian candidates for U.S. Senate and every statewide executive office except governor appear to have eked out a spot on the general election ballot. They needed to get at least 1 percent of the votes cast for a particular office, and for those offices, they are averaging about 1.2 percent.

For governor, however, which was the party’s only contested statewide race, Mike Nelson and Ruth Bennett split the vote, so neither came close to the qualifying 1 percent.

In Spokane County’s 6th Legislative District, the Libertarians managed to run a candidate in each of the state House races. But in neither did they get the minimum 1 percent, so they’re out.

The party has asked that they be put on the general election ballot anyway, as minor party candidates. Initial response from Spokane County Auditor Vicky Dalton is that there’s no legal basis for doing that.

It seems, however, that Libertarian Dave Wordinger will make it in the 7th District House race. With the results not yet certified, Wordinger has 1.0073 percent.

An even bigger concern for the Libertarians has to be the looming general election threshhold. State law says that a major party, which the Liberatarians are, must have a candidate who gets at least 5 percent of the votes cast in a statewide race, or they’ll no longer be automatically included in the primary election.

GOP tide comes in the mail

One other thing the final results from Spokane told us: Absentee ballots still trend Republican.

On election night, Republican ballots were only about 1 percent ahead of Democratic ballots in Spokane County. Democrat Patty Murray had more votes than Republican George Nethercutt for the Senate and Democrat Christine Gregoire out-polled Republican Dino Rossi for governor – margins that Democrats on the West Side duly noted.

But the GOP either has more people who like to vote absentee, or did a better job of getting people to the mailbox.

When all the ballots were counted last Friday, Republicans had an edge of about 6,000 ballots, or about 5 percent of the total. Nethercutt was more than 2,500 ahead of Murray and Rossi about 2,000 ahead of Gregoire in the county.