The loudest message from our recent election, the pundits and the experts have insisted, is that Washingtonians feel overtaxed.

Tax fatigue, the experts shout. Vindication!, Tim Eyman screams.

Maybe.

But, there’s a louder — if more predictable — lesson that we continue to ignore.

Washington doesn’t vote.

Yes, 51 percent of state voters approved I-960, an anti-tax measure which seems likely to handicap state government as severely as I-695 did to local governments a decade ago.

Yes, Roads and Transit went down in flames — over 55 percent of voters rejected it.

But, please. Less than 50 percent of us voted. Washington’s residents are feeling overtaxed? The residents?

I had a math teacher once who told me that there were three types of people in this world: Those who could count, and those who couldn’t.

Conclusions like that remind me that Mr. Robertson was right.

Across the state, turnout was a paltry 49.5 percent.

In Snohomish County, turnout edged just over 50 percent. Like, just. It took more than a week of counting stray absentee ballots before turnout dragged itself to 50.51 percent.

In King County, turnout was a miserable 48 percent.

Before anybody rushes to grand conclusions about “Washington’s residents” feeling overtaxed or anything else, then, let’s re-examine the evidence:

About 25 percent of registered voters rejected I-960.

A landslide 27 percent rejected Roads and Transit.

The messages I’m learning don’t include any sweeping conclusions about the electorate’s feeling on taxes, or candidates, or even on mass transit.

My conclusions are broader and simpler. To my friends in the media, let me propose these alternative messages:

¿ Washington does not much care; and

¿ Washington cannot really be bothered;

Obviously, we are all — voters or otherwise — bound to the anti-tax results from November’s election. (That’s mostly obvious, at least. With Eyman involved, there’s no telling what the Supreme Court might say.) Being bound by the decisions of those who care enough to return a ballot that has been mailed to them is, I whole-heartedly agree, a good thing.

But, I write for a newspaper. And I love to draw conclusions.

Fortunately, I’m in the first of Mr. Robertson’s categories: I can count. Also, when I draw conclusions, I like to draw the right ones.

Overtaxed? Hardly. Shamefully apathetic? Now we’re talking.