Voting in Washington is supposed to be as easy as it gets. The ballot shows up in the mail with plenty of time to fill it out and explanatory information about what’s at stake. With access to the ballot box facing attacks in states across America, there’s a certain comfort to the established access to mail-in voting here, as Sen. Patty Kuderer, D-Bellevue, said recently in a committee meeting.
“Really what we have is the gold standard,” Kuderer told her colleagues. “And we are truly envied by other states in terms of our accessibility, the security, the random audits. And how we do things in this state is admired by many of our colleagues across the country.”
Shoring up this steadiness ought to drive policy. Yet, too often, multiple levels of government have given evidence of habitual overthinking to add fresh wrinkles, rather than buttressing what works and streamlining away known challenges. The system’s unrepaired gnarliness shows itself pretty often. A few examples:
- In Seattle’s Capitol Hill and nearby neighborhoods, residents received three mail-in ballots in four months — for a general election, a city council recall and education measures — and a fourth invitation to go online and elect county conservation district leadership.
- The state has specific requirements for public ballot boxes, such as a ban on electioneering. Yet because ballots also come with postage-paid return envelopes, the distinction from regular old mailboxes is more technical than practical to voters. That fuzzes up the rationale for being restrictive about what can happen near one but not the other. In that Seattle City Council recall, Councilmember Kshama Sawant’s supporters set up a ballot printer and campaign literature right outside a Broadway post office, which is not a “voting center” in the law’s eyes but is, in fact, a place where one can submit a vote.
- You don’t have to sign up with a political party to participate — except, that is, to vote in the all-important presidential primaries. For those, the big political parties set the rules without paying the bills. Neat trick.
This is a mishmash even without considering how many aspects of government voters are asked to make informed decisions about. Washington elects a daunting nine statewide executives, from governor to superintendent of public instruction. Only North Carolina and North Dakota elect more. There are ballot initiatives. There are school bonds that require supermajority approval. There are party committee officers on county ballots and nonbinding advisory polls with confoundingly calculated price tags gauging voter frustrations every time the Legislature installs a tax rate.
