Photos and reporting by Johnathon Fitzpatrick.
The King County Elections ballot processing center in Renton is intermittently busy and calm as the final batches of ballots arrive and get processed before the 8pm deadline for voting in the county’s first all-mail primary election.
A batch of 40,000 ballots just arrived from the US Postal Service. Ballot boxes are being emptied throughout the day. According to elections officials, only about 40 voters have come to the county’s three handicap-accessible centers to vote in person.
Although a drop-off box in Ballard was reportedly stuffed full last night, KC Elections says the problem has been fixed and that no other problems have been reported. If you encounter any issues, contact the voter hotline at 206-205-VOTE (8683).
So far, only 3 percent of the ballots that have been counted have had signature issues, and between 6 and 7 percent have had readability errors (over/under written, wrong color pen, write-in, etc; see above). Tonight’s results should cover between 150,000 and 200,000 ballots.
The processing center will still be getting in big batches through Thursday. The election won’t be certified until is September 2.
All the ballots that have already been scanned have been counted; the results will be tabulated at 8:00 tonight and posted to King County’s web site at 8:15.
