Out of its 200,000 registered voters, Thurston County Auditor’s Office updated more than 27,000 voter records in 2021 alone.
Thurston County Auditor Mary Hall said in a press release that up-to-date voter rolls are a “top priority” for her office’s voter registration staff.
“We work with our partners at the state and federal level every day to ensure our voter rolls are accurate,” Hall said.
The 2021 updates included 491 voter registrations canceled by voter request; 632 voter registrations canceled because the voter died; 14,361 voter registrations moved to inactive status because mail was returned as undeliverable; and 95 voter registrations kept in pending status because of incomplete registration forms and the voter did not respond to the request for additional information.
In order to maintain the accuracy of voter registration data, the Thurston County Auditor’s Office works with several partners, including the Office of the Secretary of State, the Social Security Administration, the United State Postal Service National Change of Address Program, the Department of Licensing, the Department of Health, the Department of Corrections, and the Office of the Administrator of the Courts.
“Our most important partner in this effort are voters,” Hall said. “If voters receive a ballot for a deceased voter, a voter who has moved or anyone who does not live at that address, they should contact the auditor’s office.”
Ballots can be returned to the auditor’s office through USPS by writing “deceased” or “not at this address” before their return deposit in the mail.
“The postal service returns those ballots to us, and we cancel or inactivate the voter according to state and federal law,” Hall said.
The Thurston County Auditor’s Office wishes to alert people to a canvassing group that claims the county’s voter rolls are not updated in a timely manner after it took a non-random voter-roll sample of 1.91%. In the release, the auditor’s office claimed there is not enough data to substantiate the claims, and called the group’s publicity on the matter “disinformation.”
“What we do know about this group is they spent weeks going door to door canvassing voters without a public announcement, which led to dozens of voters calling our offices,” Hall said. “Many voters clearly thought that it was (the) auditor’s staff canvassing.”
