KING COUNTY, Wash. — Now that all 76 ballot drop boxes within King County have been emptied, they are being processed at the King County Election Headquarters.
“The first stop is going to go through our sorter machines,” explained Julie Wise, King County Director of Elections. “These are high speed sorters that are taking a picture of your signature on the return envelope, as well as scanning a bar code that’s associated with each individual voter and that’s where you can track your ballot at the first step.”
From there, the ballot goes to signature verifications and then it’s time to be opened, scanned and counted.
People can observe the process in-person or through several livestreams on the Department of Elections website.
Almost 200,000 ballots were counted last night with over 500,000 ballots still needing to be counted, according to Wise.
Wise says voter turnout in King County is significantly higher than other counties across the country.
“We’re at 38% right now, we’re going to obviously continue to count ballots, probably be caught up by Friday, still looking at maybe 44-, 45-percent here in King County,” said Wise. “When we look across the country, the turnout average for a primary in a midterm like this is actually 24% and vote by mail states continue to see some of the highest in this country.”
Washington state is a top-two primary, so the top two vote getters, no matter their party, will move on to compete in November’s general election.
The primary election will be certified on Aug. 16.
Any voters needing to fix signature issues can do so until 4 p.m. on Aug. 15.
To view all the latest results of the August 2 primary election, visit KIRO7.com/election.