With one countywide measure and four local items on the ballot, Snohomish County voters on Tuesday showed themselves to be a discerning lot.

The results: a jail-related tax, local government change and two of three school levies apparently got the thumbs down while one school operating levy passed comfortably. A mixed bag? Maybe, but a closer look may show more.

The biggest item was the proposed one-tenth of 1 percent sales tax to help operate the new jail that is being built with money from bond sales. The tax would’ve raised about $9 million of the estimated $15 million annual operating cost with the rest coming from the regular budget.

County officials thought they’d done their homework with a survey that said voters were more likely to approve an increase in the sales tax than the property tax. Perhaps what they didn’t ask is whether voters liked the idea of moving ahead with an admittedly needed jail expansion with no guarantee of how to run the thing.

As for school levies, Marysville voters said “yes” to a maintenance and operations levy needed to keep schools open but defeated a facilities improvement bond. Perhaps voters didn’t want to penalize the children but also didn’t forget that district’s recent and rancorous labor issues.

In Monroe, the count on whether a measure to sell improvement bonds is too close to call, with just less than 60 percent saying, “Yes.”

And in Sultan, despite a well-publicized feud between the mayor and police chief, the voters correctly recognized that it is a problem with the people in those positions, not the process.

Would some public officials preferred different outcomes? Absolutely, but the answers they got weren’t because voters weren’t paying attention.