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Opinion
The following is presented as part of The Columbian’s Opinion content, which offers a point of view in order to provoke thought and debate of civic issues. Opinions represent the viewpoint of the author. Unsigned editorials represent the consensus opinion of The Columbian’s editorial board, which operates independently of the news department.
There’s been profound cynicism of late about democracy and our elections —most of it manufactured by the MAGA wing of the Republican Party. You might think it’s a wonder anybody votes any more.
In our primary election three weeks ago, it at first seemed, thanks to premature reporting, that maybe people don’t vote anymore.
“Washington state voter turnout less than 25 percent for primaries,” read a headline from KOMO-TV, the day after the Aug. 2 primary. The conservative press jumped on this factoid the next day to hint that voters really had lost faith in the way we vote.
“Voter turnout in Washington state’s vote by mail primary is once again extremely low,” wrote the Post Millennial, a conservative site. It went on to speculate about “voter apathy based on allegations of problems with the vote by mail system.”
Nationally, MAGA megaphones like former Donald Trump adviser Steve Bannon went full-on conspiracy bananas, accusing Washington, through its use of vote by mail, of purposely quelling the votes of real Americans, who strive to do their duty in person.
“These are people who come to the polls on something called Election Day, and vote, in a booth,” Bannon fumed on his podcast the War Room. “This is all to suppress their votes.”
Can we please put this baloney to rest, once and for all?
Last week the primary election vote was certified — first by all 39 counties, red and blue, then by the secretary of state. It turns out that not only were there no problems with vote by mail, but Washington had the third highest turnout in the nation.
So far, 44 states have held primaries. At 40.4 percent of all registered voters casting a ballot, Washington ranks ahead of 41 of them, according to a national voting advocacy group.
Ranking first is Wyoming, a small-population state with one Congressional district. That district happens to house controversial U.S. Rep. Liz Cheney. A Wyoming primary record of 63 percent of registered voters turned out.
Ranking second is Kansas, at 47 percent. It was a “monumental” turnout for a primary there, The Kansas City Star reported, for a special abortion referendum that came a month after Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court.
Next is us. It may not seem like 40.4 percent is high, but you should see some of these other states. New Jersey’s primary turnout was 11 percent.
For nonpresidential year primaries, this was one of our best. Washington has seen three of late with roughly the same turnout. Every other nonpresidential year primary has been lower going back to 1970.
The reality is, not that many people vote in primaries. But six out of the top eight states for primary turnout so far — Washington, Hawaii, Montana, Oregon, Utah and Arizona — have been states where most of the voting is done by mail.
There was no fraud reported either, at least not significant fraud. (I use the qualifier “significant” because in most every election there are dispersed and largely immaterial cases, such as when someone votes a recently deceased spouse’s ballot.) You may recall that a group called Drop Box Watch made local and national headlines when it said it was surveilling the state’s ballot boxes to catch unscrupulous “mules” in the act of rigging the vote. Didn’t hear a peep out of them.
Back in the real world, democracy lovers should be celebrating. Sure it took a while to count the votes, but we just had an election with the third highest voter participation in the country. Yet the biggest takeaway is that it was too ho-hum — so ho-hum that nobody knows about it.
In sports, the sign that the referees did a good job is when you didn’t notice them. Same is true with voting. This is ultimately how the “big lie” and the vast misinformation campaign of election denial, fabricated solely to cast doubt on certain democratic outcomes, will be disproved and defeated. It will be one boring old election at a time.
