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.
Lewis County is currently among the top-ten counties with the highest voter turnout percentage in Washington’s 2020 primary election that saw high voter turnout across the state.
Of Lewis County’s 51,221 registered voters, 60.7 percent turned out to vote in the 2020 primary election, good for the tenth highest voter turnout percentage out of the state’s 39 counties.
“Usually the turnout is anywhere from 35 to 40 percent, historically,” for an even-year primary election said Lewis County Election Supervisor Heather Boyer. “So it’s a little higher than we were expecting.”
“But also we have a lot more candidates for the governor’s race,” she added. “And it’s a pretty contentious election cycle so it’s hard to anticipate what you’re going to get back.”
Lewis County’s high turnout was in tandem with the state, which saw its highest voter turnout in a primary election since 1964 with a little more than 55 percent of Washington’s 4.6 million registered voters turning out, according to Secretary of State spokesperson Kylee Zabel.
In 1964, 56 percent of Washingtonians, or 841,932 registered voters casted ballots, Zabel wrote in an email.
She noted the highest primary turnout to date in Washington was in 1936 when 65.2 percent of registered voters casted ballots.
For reference, in the 2018 primary election, 40.2 percent of Lewis County’s registered voters cast ballots which was right on par with the statewide turnout of 40.8 percent. And in 2016 — which was also a presidential election year — primary voter turnout was at 35.2 percent in Lewis County and 34.8 percent statewide.
Boyer noted that the 2020 primary election voter turnout was particularly high, and certainly the highest it has been since 2012, but did not have data going back any further readily available and couldn’t say when the last time voter turnout was this high or whether it was the highest turnout for a primary election ever.
When stacked up against counties with comparable amounts of registered voters, like Clallam County (60.3 percent voter turnout) with 54,750 or Island County (62.5 percent) with 59,203, Lewis County had a similar voter turnout percentage.
In general, smaller, rural counties had higher voter turnout percentages than larger, urban counties.
Ten of the 11 counties, Lewis County included, with a voter turnout percentage of 60 percent or higher had fewer than 60,000 registered voters and five had less than 15,000 registered voters.
The only county with a voter turnout percentage higher than 60 percent that had more than 100,000 registered voters was Whatcom County.
Larger neighboring counties like Thurston (53.3 percent), Pierce (51.3 percent) and Yakima (44.1 percent), were as much as 16 percent and as little as 7 percent behind Lewis County.
Compared with neighboring counties of a smaller or similar size, like Cowlitz (54.6 percent), Grays Harbor (53.7 percent) Skamania (50.3 percent), Wahkiakum (62.9 percent) and Pacific (60.9 percent), Lewis County was still among the highest in voter turnout percentage.
The highest voter turnout percentage came from Ferry County (68.6 percent), followed by San Juan (67 percent), Jefferson (66.9 percent), Garfield (66.4 percent) and Lincoln (63.3 percent).
To see more results from Washington’s 2020 primary election, visit: https://results.vote.wa.gov/results/20200804/.
