SPOKANE COUNTY, Wash. — It’s the final stretch of election season and according to the latest numbers, nearly 190,000 ballots have already been cast in Spokane County. Election officials expect that number to increase exponentially in the coming days.
“It’s about 11,000 ballots a day that we’re receiving in the mail and a little bit more in the drop boxes, but that will increase over the next four days,” said Spokane County elections manager Mike McLaughlin. “We are expecting over 120,000 ballots to be delivered over the next four to five days.”
Right now, officials in the Spokane County Elections Office are hard at work processing your ballots. Once a ballot gets picked up from the drop boxes around the county, they are organized and sorted to make sure they are eligible. After that comes signature verification.
Your envelope will go through one more round of sorting before someone finally takes the ballot out of its secured envelope. Then you vote will be recorded.
McLaughlin said he’s confident the system is secure. There are always at least two people with the ballots and someone cannot enter the ballot processing room without a badge to get in. There are also election observers who are volunteers from each political party watching as election officials process the ballots.
“Spokane County is very secure and safe. Yes, everything,” said Christine Muth, a Republican election observer. “There’s two people who do everything. Things are double checked and recounted and double counted.”
“I’m impressed with this whole situation,” said Democratic election observer Jackie Kabrell. “This whole organization and what they’re doing and I think that citizens can feel very comfortable that the Spokane County ballots are being properly counted.”
The number of ballots returned in Spokane County has already surpassed the total number returned during the Washington primaries. But officials say that amount is still trending less than what they received during the 2020 presidential election.
“We have a lot of people that returned their ballots early in 2020 so we’re actually about 46,000 ballots behind what we received in 2020. It’s not really a comparable election to realize what’s going on,” said McLaughlin.
McLaughlin credits the pandemic as to why more people voted early in 2020.
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