Camden: Washingtonians’ excuses for not voting run the gamut

Those seem a bit hard to believe, at least in such significant numbers, because it is relatively easy to get a ballot from the elections office.

Even harder to believe were people who said a major factor in not voting were things like “the polling place hours or location were inconvenient” or “the line was too long.” Because this is a national survey, the questions had some answers not geared to Washington’s system. But a Washington voter using that as an excuse hasn’t voted in years, since the state dumped poll site voting in favor of all-mail balloting. About 7 percent listed “I didn’t know where to vote” as their major factor for not voting. Clearly, they aren’t opening their ballot, which would explain that you can vote by putting the completed ballot in the envelope and sticking it back out in the mailbox.

Among those who did vote, about 40 percent put the ballot in a drop box. Those who mailed it back were about equally split between taking it to the post office and having it picked up by the mail carrier at home. No easy way to tell, but the numbers probably shift from home to post office as Election Day approaches to make sure the envelope gets postmarked.

About one-third of voters surveyed are still not fond of all-mail voting, saying they either somewhat oppose or strongly oppose that system. Half would oppose Internet voting, and 7 out of 10 would oppose cellphone voting. The most popular suggestion to improve voting: Automatically registering a voter when he or she moves, which almost three-fourths of those surveyed support.

Another interesting tidbit in the survey was the way a voter’s trust in the system drops the farther away it gets.

Asked how confident they are that votes were counted as intended, 92 percent were either very confident or somewhat confident their own vote was counted correctly, and 87 percent were confident that votes in their county were generally counted correctly. For the state, that confidence level dipped slightly to 80 percent (a few Eastern Washington residents might still harbor suspicions about King County elections from the 2004 gubernatorial race). But when asked about their confidence that votes are counted correctly nationwide, that drops to just over 50 percent. Insert your favorite joke about dead people voting in Chicago here.

Say what?

“Are those questions that could be resolved in the budget, or are those questions that would be resolved with a Ouija board or something? Is it knowable?”

That was Appropriations Committee Chairman Ross Hunter, D-Medina, after being told the costs of expanding medical residencies for rural and Eastern Washington were not known in a bill that called for that expansion.

Staff told him that the costs could be assigned with specific directions in the budget.