Spin Control: Mail-in voting proved its value in Tuesday’s primary

Anyone who has been lobbying to drop mail-in voting and return to in-person, poll-site voting – so much safer, more secure, more inclusive, yada yada – might just want to shut the heck up in the wake of last Tuesday’s election in Spokane.

Because during an emergency, which can happen any day, including Election Day, requiring people to go to their neighborhood polling station can range from difficult to impossible.

If Washington law had required voters to show up at the polls Tuesday, a significant portion of the Spokane electorate wouldn’t have been able to. Along with homes and businesses, the evacuation zones would have contained the schools, neighborhood centers and church halls where ballots had to be cast.

People who left wouldn’t have been allowed back in to cast a ballot. Those who didn’t evacuate would have been out of luck, too, because the election workers wouldn’t have been let in to man the polling stations.

Establishing replacement polling sites in a safer area would have been difficult, too. That would have required moving the voting machinery and ballots set up for specific precincts, Spokane County Auditor Vicky Dalton said last week.

And probably finding some replacements for election workers who were otherwise occupied trying to save or evacuate their homes, relocate to shelters or stay temporarily with family or friends.

In the days of poll-site voting, Spokane County had roughly 1,200 election workers on Election Day, Dalton said. It’s doubtful all of them would have been able to show up for work on Tuesday.

“It was tough enough with the 140 people we had” on Tuesday, she said.

Spokane County did have a drop box in an evacuation area, the one at Indian Trail Library. Election workers were able to get in Monday night to empty it. None of the ballots were damaged, and the box was locked as a precaution.

“We did not lose any ballots in our drop boxes,” Dalton said. It’s not yet known how many ballots placed in home mailboxes for pickup or in U.S. Postal Service boxes before the wildfires blew up may have been destroyed.

Even as the fires raged, the elections office got calls from people in evacuation zones who stayed with their homes asking how they could vote without being denied re-entry to the area, Dalton said. She talked to one man who had his ballot marked but didn’t want to leave the area; she told him to take it to the barricade and give it to someone he trusted to place in a drop box.

“We heard several stories like that,” she said.

This is not to suggest that every voter who wanted to cast a ballot in the middle of a raging wildfire could, or that every ballot that was sent off over the weekend survived the flames. But as usual, a significant number of ballots marked and returned in the weeks before last weekend were safely in the hands of elections officials , and there were ways for evacuees who left their ballots behind to print new ones.

It wasn’t ideal, or even easy in some cases. But as of Friday, Spokane County turnout for the primary hovered around 38%, which was close to the state average of 40% and slightly better than King County’s 36%.

An unusual election stat

Every ballot is counted by machines, even if it doesn’t show up in the tallies for the candidates, which is why sometimes the total number of votes for all the people seeking an office won’t match the total number of ballots cast. Nothing nefarious about it.

The difference is usually a result of voters not voting for anyone in a race. Such ballots are recorded as “undervotes” and are most numerous when there’s only one person seeking a particular office.

But the difference can also be the result of “overvotes,” which happen when a ballot is marked for more than one candidate, or both the “Yes” and the “No” option. (This despite the ballot clearly stating “Vote For One.”) Overvotes, when they happen, are usually just a handful.

But the 5th Congressional District primary, which had a record number of candidates, also had an unusual number of overvotes: 173 as of Friday. So either those voters couldn’t make up their minds; or thought they could vote for one Democrat, one Republican and possibly one independent; or thought Washington had adopted some sort of ranked choice voting system. In any case, none of those ballots show up in the results.