A man uses his shirt to cover his face as he drops his ballot off at a ballot box in the Lewis County Courthouse during the primary election in August.
Following the national trend of voters turning out early in the 2020 presidential election, Lewis County voters have returned approximately 47 percent of their ballots as of Saturday, according to the Lewis County Auditor’s Office.
Of the 53,752 registered voters, 25,458 ballots have already been turned in, said county Elections Supervisor Heather Boyer on Monday, noting that she expects the number to climb past 50 percent later in the day.
The outpour of early voters in 2020 has made the early voting data from 2016 pale in comparison.
In 2016, when there was just a week left until the election, Lewis County voters had returned about 30 percent of their ballots. And the 2016 presidential election was similar to 2020 in terms of anticipation, Boyer noted.
“So there’s a little bit of a jump,” Boyer said while laughing. “We’ve been a little busy.”
For now, it is “inconclusive” if the 47 percent of early voters nearly a week before the election is a Lewis County record. Boyer said it would require her poring over all of the archived data from past elections, which would be extremely time consuming.
“But I know we had a pretty high turnout in 2016 as well and we’re anticipating a higher turnout this year,” Boyer said. “So we had 78 percent overall in 2016 and we’re thinking we’re going to hit at least 80 (percent).”
The early voting in Lewis County is consistent with a much broader trend of Americans and Washingtonians getting their ballots in early. According to an Oct. 16 Associated Press news report, 17 million Americans had voted early, representing 12 percent of all the votes casted in 2016.
The report characterizes the national early voting data in the 2020 presidential election as “record-shattering” and attributes it to “Democratic enthusiasm” and a “pandemic that has transformed the way the nation votes.”
The number of early voters has experts predicting that there might be a record 150 million Americans that cast ballots in 2020 and that the turnout rates could be higher than any election since 1908.
At the state level, Washington follows the very same trend that can be observed around the nation and in Lewis County.
As of Oct. 21, nearly a quarter of all Washington voters — or 1,208,238 of the state’s 4,828,253 registered voters — had already placed their ballots in a drop box, according to a King 5 news report. It was a substantial uptick from the 2016 presidential election when the state had seen about 10 percent of registered voters turn in ballots early in the same timeframe.
Boyer also noted that there are currently 201 “challenged ballots” among Lewis County voters, meaning the signature on the declaration envelope was either not signed or the signature did not match the one on file at the auditor’s office.
Some of those challenged ballots are being worked out right now, Boyer said, but if your ballot was challenged, you will receive a letter in the mail as well as a phone call from the auditor’s office to fix the mistake.
