Some Island County residents are still awaiting November ballots

By Laura Guido / South Whidbey Record

As election day nears, some Island County residents are concerned that they still haven’t received their ballots.

Last Monday, the U.S. Postal Service alerted the Island County Elections Office that two containers of Island County ballots were misrouted, according to Michele Reagan, county elections supervisor. She didn’t know how many individual ballots this mistake affected.

The postal service said the ballots had since been sent back to Seattle and re-delivered to the correct addresses, Reagan said.

However, Langley resident Sarah Primrose said she and her partner, Russell Clepper, hadn’t received theirs as of Monday afternoon.

“I’m not holding out a lot of hope,” Primrose said.

During her 34 years on Whidbey Island, nothing like this has ever happened, she said.

Primrose said she became concerned after speaking to friends who had already voted. She contacted the county elections office, and that’s when she learned about the mail snafu.

Primrose waited for her ballot to be resent to her, but it didn’t come, she said. She and Clepper printed the ballot documents from myvote.wa.gov, a website through the state secretary of state office.

“It’s disconcerting,” Primrose said.

Craig Cyr, while working on a local campaign, said he came across “quite a few” people who hadn’t received their ballots before realizing it was a systematic issue. As of last Saturday, he encountered three more people who were still waiting to be able to vote.

Primrose is one of those people. She said she feels lucky she realized there was a problem before it was too late.

“It’s our right,” she said. “It’s everyone’s right to vote.”

Anyone who is registered to vote but hasn’t received a ballot yet can print one from myvote.wa.gov or vote in-person at the Island County Elections Office at 400 N Main St., Coupeville.

This story originally appeared in the Whidbey News-Times, a sibling paper of The Daily Herald.