Vote-by-mail vote showed people’s will

Let’s get one thing straight up front: Spin Control is a big fan of voting at the polls, and its author has gone to the same polling station at least twice a year for 24 years.

That said, it’s difficult to understand the reluctance of Spokane County commissioners to switch to all-mail voting in the wake of Tuesday’s election.

Commissioner Todd Mielke said he thought taking away poll voting “strikes at the core of democracy.” Leaving aside the American Government 101 lecture that this is a republic, not a democracy, the place where we come closest to democracy is when our leaders ask their constituents to show what they think by putting something on the ballot.

So if a majority of the voters say they want their leaders to do something – and the leaders don’t do it – how is that democratic? Going with the preference of a clear minority of voters may be wise and smart and thrifty – well, maybe not so thrifty because adding a measure to the county ballot costs taxpayers about $10,000, whether one follows it or ignores it – but it is anti-democratic.

Commissioner Phil Harris voiced reservations about the ballot being misleading. Setting aside the fact that the commissioners voted to put that language on the ballot, his suggestion for what it should have said is puzzling.

Harris thought the ballot title should have said that people already have the right to vote by mail. But at least 60 percent of the county’s voters know that, because – get this – they vote by mail. All the time. They are permanent absentee voters.

And not to pound this democracy thing into the ground or anything, but an even greater majority of the public who voted in Tuesday’s election did so by mail, because mail voters are almost always more likely to cast ballots than poll voters.

At last count, about 70 percent of the people who voted in Tuesday’s election did so by mail, so clearly the vast majority – better than two of every three voters – knew that people in Spokane County can, at this point, stick their ballots in mailboxes instead of computer scanners at poll sites.

Commissioner Mark Richard is also reconsidering support for the switch to all-mail voting, in light of the fact the margin of victory has slipped from the stratospheric levels it enjoyed early Tuesday, before votes from the poll sites were added in.

Mail voters supported their system by about 70 percent; poll voters supported theirs by about 68 percent. Put them together and County Proposition 1 has about 58 percent support.

So yes, that’s less than the 70 percent from the early returns. But it’s about equal to the 57.9 percent Harris received and better than the 51 percent he received in 1998; and it’s better than the 55 percent who voted for Mielke or the 51 percent who voted for Richard.

While it’s true that those weren’t advisory votes, no one questioned what the voters were saying in any of those elections.

Where are those pro-mail voters?

As previously mentioned, the greatest support for voting by mail came from those who vote by mail. But geographically, there were some distinct differences, too.

A computerized map of the precinct results shows that mail voting is most popular in the rural precincts in south Spokane County, and on some precincts that flank the city of Spokane on the west and east, and a few that lie to the south of the city of Spokane Valley.

Most likely to vote “no” on all-mail voting were voters in north central Spokane County along Highway 395, in the Latah Creek precincts of Spokane, in and around Millwood and Cheney, and just north of Liberty Lake.

Some precincts that went big for all-mail voting bump up with precincts that went big for keeping the polls open.

More on voter geography

Other ballot measures had some interesting geographic spreads as well. The extra tenth of a cent sales tax had its biggest support in the center of Spokane, on either side of Interstate 90 and spreading up the South Hill. It was voted down by the largest margins in some rural precincts in the southeast part of the county and the rural areas around Deer Park.

The gasoline tax got hammered in most rural precincts. The vote against Initiative 912, which was a vote to keep the gas tax in place, was strongest in the city of Spokane.

The city precincts around Manito Park were among the most tax-friendly. They went for the levy lid lift and the sales tax in a big way, and were also strongly against I-912.