Our View: Snow’s exciting, but how about that voter turnout?

The Inland Northwest’s historic snowfall has diverted our attention from the record avalanche of votes cast by Washingtonians last month in the 2008 general election.

The weather will produce more memories – and photographs – than the civics. But while the snowfall will have more impact on scrapbooks, the election will have more impact on lives.

Just as precipitation can be measured precisely in inches accumulated, voter participation can be tabulated in its own crisp mathematical terms. Washington’s numbers on Election Day were almost as impressive as the weather display of the past several days:

Out of 3,630,118 registered voters in the state, 84.61 percent – or 3,071,587 – cast ballots, the vast majority by mail. In both raw numbers and as a percentage, voter participation in this year’s election was the most robust in state history. The previous percentage record – 84.5 percent – had stood since 1944.

In fact, Washington stands as one of the top three states in the nation in terms of voter turnout in 2008, according to Secretary of State Sam Reed.

For the record, nonprofitvote.org, which measures turnout as a percentage of those eligible to vote (regardless of whether they’ve registered), calculates Washington’s performance as a little better than 66 percent and places the state 37th in the nation.

It would be easy to get bogged down in a dispute over which computation means more, but that distracts our attention from a bigger issue.

We’re good at taking a quantitative measure of voter involvement – namely turnout, which is a matter of arithmetic purity. We’re not so good at taking a qualitative measure. We know how big the turnout was, but how good was it?

Were the voters well informed? Did the outcome accurately reflect the electorate’s collective feelings? Did the candidates, the news media, the voters themselves give us a campaign in which choices were based on true understanding of issues and abilities?

If the random voices we heard during and after the campaign are accurate, money and the superficial advertising it buys had more influence on the outcome of the election than anything else.

Secretary of State Reed called the vote “a defining moment in our elections history,” and he praised voters for their enthusiasm.

“We hope that citizens will continue to stay engaged in public life and not just put away their voter’s card until the next big election,” he said. “Our communities and our state are facing difficult challenges and great needs, and citizen involvement has never been more critical.”

We concur. Responsible citizens should treat Reed’s remarks as a call to action.