Election officials are trying to make voting more attractive to increase voter participation. For instance, there are now fun electronic voting machines at the polls.
And voting is easier than ever, and can be done at home through absentee ballots.
Yet, only 71,565 ballots were counted in the Sept. 16 primary election – just 22 percent of Snohomish County’s 324,135 registered voters. And that doesn’t figure in the hundreds of thousands of people who aren’t registered to vote.
County elections manager Carolyn Diepenbrock said she hoped another 18,000 absentees would push the total turnout to 30 percent. But even that is nowhere near the 35 percent voter turnout predicted.
“It’s disappointing,” Diepenbrock said. “We live in a wonderful country. We don’t realize the huge gift we have” of being able to vote.
Diepenbrock said her office counted about 53,000 absentee ballots during two Sept. 16 shifts.
“We had an additional run to kind of plan for next year with the presidential election,” she said.
Those results were released at 8:05 p.m., and then cartridges from polling places with information from the electronic voting machines started coming in about a half-hour later.
They had a goal of counting all absentees that came in Tuesday, Sept. 16, but they “were unable to do that,” Diepenbrock said, adding they fell about 1,200 short. The only other glitch was that final results weren’t posted until Wednesday morning, Sept. 17.
Diepenbrock said she expected the office to count most of the 18,000 absentees on Friday, Sept. 19. The election will be certified Sept. 26.
She said her first big election as manager here “went very well, except for the low voter turnout.”
Steve Powell is a reporter with The Herald in Everett.
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