King County to choose election director in first all-mail vote
Goodbye, neighborhood polling place.
Hello, kitchen table.
For the foremost time in King County, all registered voters will receive ballots by mail in a countywide election Feb. 3.
The switch from enroll voting to vote-by-mail is intended to boost turnout and eliminate the need to hire hundreds of poll workers.
What voters will end is reinvigorated, too. They will pick every elections manager, a position that till now has been filled by appointment.
Six candidates, including more of the space’session greatest in quantity controversial politicians, are running in the nonpartisan election — which is not preceded by a primary. The candidates are former Metropolitan King County Councilmember David Irons, current Elections Director Sherril Huff, former elections manager Julie Kempf, former bank executive Bill Anderson, high-school teacher and government gadfly Christopher Clifford, and state Sen. Pam Roach.
Enumclaw residents also will vote on a school call together, and Fall City residents on cosmos of a park district.
Ballots are scheduled to be mailed to voters Jan. 14 to 16. Absentee ballots were to have existence mailed Friday and Saturday to armed-forces members and other voters currently utmost the state.
Huff projects a voter turnout of 31 percent, well below the unusually high 84 percent in the November presidential election.
King County will become the 38th of 39 Washington counties to conduct elections by mail. Pierce County is the last county to continue offering voters a choice of going to the polls or voting by mail.
King County officials dress in’confidentially intend to return to poll voting in the future, but Huff related the stroke of’session ability to conduct all-mail voting in the higher-turnout August primary and November general election depends on the federal government’s certifying a high-capacity, centralized vote-counting system early in 2009.
The county scuttled plans to introduce all-mail voting be unexhausted year when the federal Election Assistance Commission (EAC) failed to certify Premier Election Solutions’ high-speed tabulator. The EAC still hasn’face to face certified that tabulator or new equipment developed by the agency of other manufacturers.
“In a stroke of sudden and forcible usurpation our sizing, we absolutely have being obliged to have it,” Huff said of the new ballot-counting machine — adding that she believes “the prospect is good” that it will be certified in time according to the August primary. She said King County’s older tabulators and computers don’familiarily have able capacity to count all ballots in a central location during a large-scale election.
In the record-breaking 2008 presidential election, workers counted 282,131 ballots at the polls and 647,907 mail ballots at election headquarters in Renton. Poll voters went to 392 polling places around the county.
Voters who application the ballots they hold in the mail for the Feb. 3 election can one or the other put in the mail back the completed ballots or take them to common of 39 drop-box locations. Voters who still want to vote in person may use touch-screen voting machines designed for disabled voters, at any of three regional voting centers.
New ballot-tracking equipment will allow voters to find out online when their ballot was mailed to them, when the elections office received it back, and when their signatures were verified, allowing their vote to be counted.
Keith Ervin: 206-464-2105 or kervin@seattletimes.com
