EDITOR’S NOTE: The Republican Observer is a Republican precinct committee officer in Washington state and a close observer of events in Olympia. She writes legislative updates for her mailing list, and is generously allowing us to post them here.
The Election Will Be Close This Year
Will your ballot be accepted or rejected?
It’s election time. It’s when the rubber meets the road. Please vote your ballot, and get it turned in! If you want to wait until the last day, that’s fine, but I don’t agree with doing that for several reasons. First, you may forget. This is a critical election, and a ballot left sitting on the kitchen counter is never counted. Ever.
Secondly, the Secretary of State’s office keeps track of every ballot that gets turned in. While the votes are not counted, and they have no idea what your actual vote is, they record your name in a database which is then used by the parties to figure out who has voted and who has not voted. This allows them to know whether they should be calling you to remind you to get that ballot in. If you turn your vote in early, many will take your name off their calling list. Wouldn’t that be a blessing for everyone?!
Finally, there is another, very important reason to get that ballot in a little early. Your ballot may be rejected. Rejected, you say? Yes. Rejected. If you turn your ballot in early, you can find out whether it has been accepted or rejected and will then have the time to get the problem resolved before the actual night of the election. Then your vote will be counted at the beginning.
Before I get into how you can tell the status of your ballot, let me tell you how the ballots are processed and define some of the terminology. When you turn your ballot in, your name is added to a database at the Secretary of State’s office that says your ballot was “Received”. Then your name and signature are matched with the signature you used when you registered to vote. If the signature matches, your ballot is accepted. It isn’t counted right then, but the secrecy envelope is removed from the one that has your name on it, so how you actually voted remains a secret from everyone. At this point, the status of your ballot changes to “Accepted”. Finally, if your signature does not match your signature card, the ballot status become “Rejected” or “Challenged”. It is not counted until the person who sent that ballot in confirms that the ballot is, indeed, theirs. The ballot is also rejected if there is no signature at all. The words rejected and challenged are the same thing. They are just used in different places. There are some reasons other than signature issues that will cause a ballot to be rejected, but mis-matched or missing signature are the primary reasons.
Does this mean your vote will never count? Not at all. If you take care of the issue, your ballot will be counted. There are a couple of processes you can use to remedy the mis-matched or missing signature, but as soon as that is accomplished, your ballot status will be changed to accepted, and it will be counted. Just call your county auditor or go into their office. They will be happy to fix things up for you.
So how do you find out what the status is of your ballot? There are two ways:
The SOS’s office has a spreadsheet that tracks the status of every ballot in the state. Here is the link –https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/research/2022-general-election.aspx The spreadsheet breaks down the ballot returns by county and even precinct. PCOs (or anyone else) can go there and look up who of their friends hasn’t voted yet and give them a call. Or they might find a friend or neighbor whose ballot was rejected. Last year, I found a friend whose ballot had been challenged because of a non-matching signature. He went to the courthouse right away to get that fixed, so his vote was counted on election night.
Another, easier, way to check your personal ballot is at https://voter.votewa.gov/WhereToVote.aspx
I encourage anyone who has turned in his/her ballot to look up the information on this site to see the status of their ballot. There is a lot of other information at votewa.gov – go there and look around at what is available!
I hope this gives you some added information about the voting process. Please feel free to post/send this information out far and wide. We need every vote to count this year, so we need to put as many eyes on the election as possible.
[Ed. Note: The Observer then included information about the Influencing Olympia class. We are omitting this information as out of scope for the Voter Interests Project.]
