The act of voting remains the same — fill out a ballot and turn it in. Democracy, simple and elegant.
But as Election Day approaches, there are flashing signs — fights with the feds over voter rolls, preemptive lawsuits, the National Guard being deployed — that this is not a normal election.
First: It is too late to drop your ballot in the mailbox.
Yes, Election Day isn't until Tuesday, but with changes to how the U.S. Postal Service processes postmarks, election officials are adamant that if you have not yet voted, you should use a ballot drop box, not a mailbox.
If you must mail your ballot, they say, don't drop it in a mailbox, but take it to a post office and ask them to hand-postmark it on site.
What's at stake is control of Congress, the state Legislature, the state Supreme Court and three statewide initiatives. With the national landscape looking extremely favorable for Democrats, the Trump administration has released a raft of rhetoric and legal actions looking to sow doubt upon or challenge unfavorable results even before any votes are counted.
But officials in Washington say they are confident the state's elections will be free, fair and accurate.
Voter turnout, so far, is running slightly ahead of the last midterm election. As of Friday evening, 32.8% of Washington's 5.2 million registered voters had cast a ballot. Four years ago, 32.2% had voted at this point.
The Trump administration has taken steps without obvious precedent to interfere in elections nationwide, even though the Constitution dictates elections are run by the states with input from Congress.
The Justice Department sent a letter to Washington last week, including a list of more than 400 people that it said are on the state's voter rolls but are not U.S. citizens. The Justice Department sent a similar letter to California and has sued to try to keep the state from counting ballots. That comes on the heels of the DOJ's lawsuits against Washington and many other states, seeking private voter information. Courts have blocked those requests. And in Alaska, the Trump administration filed suit to try to block certification of the Senate election there, but only if the Republican loses.
Washington Secretary of State Steve Hobbs, a Democrat who oversees the state's voter rolls and has clashed with the Trump administration, dismissed the new list of 400 alleged noncitizens. He said a preliminary review showed the list included both U.S. citizens and people who were not registered to vote in Washington.
Hobbs said that complying with the DOJ's demands to set aside ballots, without any proof of wrongdoing, would be both irresponsible and illegal."
"Sometimes we have to push back on our federal partners," Hobbs said at a forum in Federal Way last week. "Because they're being jerks."
Charles Neil Floyd, the acting U.S. attorney for Western Washington who wrote the letter with the list of alleged noncitizen voters, said Washington is "knowingly sending out ballots to noncitizens and trusting that the noncitizens will not fill out the ballot."
"The only questions are how many illegal votes are being counted in Washington and what will the state do about it," Floyd said in a statement.
On Friday, three organizations in Washington sued to block the Trump administration’s efforts to set ballots aside.
The DOJ is sending election monitors to at least two counties in Washington — King and Yakima — to observe ballot processing, voting centers and drop boxes.
DOJ officials met Tuesday for a 30-minute video call with King County officials, as well as representatives from the Washington secretary of state's and attorney general's offices.
King County Elections Director Julie Wise said the meeting was "productive and positive" and the office is expecting eight DOJ monitors on Election Day at various locations. The monitors will have the same access as the general public — but no more — to places like voting centers and the county's Elections headquarters in Renton, Wise said.
It will be the first time the federal government has sent election monitors to King County since 2008, Wise said.
A DOJ spokesperson said in an email that the agency is dispatching about 1,000 monitors around the country, to all 50 states, doing "the routine election monitoring the department has done for decades."
"Every monitor will merely observe and report any potential violations of federal law to the Department, which will be reviewed after Election Day," the spokesperson wrote.
At the same time, Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson recently wrote to all 39 counties, offering the Washington National Guard to serve as an "Election Neighborhood Watch" during voting. Ferguson cited the fire in a Clark County ballot drop box in 2024, the white powder sent to several Washington elected officials in recent weeks and the "highly charged atmosphere of this election."
Seven counties have accepted Ferguson's offer of the National Guard, his office said: King, Snohomish, Pierce, Thurston, Clark, Lewis and Island. The National Guard personnel, under state not federal control, will be out of uniform and unarmed and will merely observe high-traffic voting locations.
Change to postmarks
Voter turnout has been running ahead of 2022 in most, but not all, Washington counties. That includes Yakima County, which has a heavily Hispanic population and has seen a recent surge in immigration enforcement, including in and around courthouses.
Roxana Norouzi, executive director of OneAmerica, an immigrant rights group, said the timing of the reported surge in immigration enforcement is "not a coincidence."
"The federal government is ramping up attacks in the final weeks leading up to the midterm elections to intimidate the public and suppress the vote," Norouzi said. "While there is some fear, some apathy, there's also a lot of clarity of the consequences of this election of voting and how important it is."
Turnout in Yakima County was at 29.1% Friday, versus 26.8% at the same time in 2022.
"We're seeing strong turnout — it'll be one of the bigger off-cycle returns, I'm thinking," said Yakima County Auditor Charles Ross, a Republican. "We've had lots and lots of people in, registering in person. There's definitely a lot of energy."
Ross said his staff have been "banging the gong" to get people to use ballot drop boxes rather than the mail.
That's because late last year, the Postal Service announced changes in how mail is transported and postmarked. Mail is not normally postmarked at the post office nearest to where it is dropped. Rather, it is sent to a central distribution facility and postmarked there — not necessarily on the same day it was dropped off — before being routed to its destination.
Ross said mail dropped off in Yakima is sent to a facility in Spokane, where it is postmarked, before returning to Yakima. During the August primary, he said, they had far more ballots than usual arrive with the postmark a day too late to be counted.
A study of the August primary by Hobbs and Democratic U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell found that statewide more than 20,000 mail ballots arrived too late to be counted, a 32% increase over 2024. In Yakima County, the number of late ballots increased by 268%, the study found.
Trump this year issued an executive order that would have had the Postal Service screening ballots to deliver them only to people who matched a list of voters he wanted the federal government to compile. The Supreme Court blocked the order from taking effect.
"The Trump Administration’s moves to degrade postal service and reduce election security funding mean that state officials, county election administrators — and voters — must take a more active role in securing the fairness of our democracy," Cantwell wrote in September.
Washington has more than 650 ballot boxes and voting centers spread across the state. King County has 100 drop boxes, with 15 new ones installed this year. A decade ago, the county had just 10 drop boxes.
Wise, the King County Elections director, said that 99% of the county's 1.46 million voters now live within 3 miles of a drop box.
"We heard a lot of concerns around the United States Postal Service about postmarks that are going to be on time for our voters," she said.
Who is voting?
The real question, of course, is not just how many people are voting, but who are they voting for? That's impossible to know until ballots are counted, but we do know a little bit about who is voting so far.
When looking at early vote data, caveats galore apply. Most important, just because people haven't voted yet doesn't mean they won't vote by Election Day.
"Friends don't let friends extrapolate from early voting data," the elections data guru Nate Silver wrote as early voting was beginning nationwide.
In Washington, old people are voting. Young people not so much, at least so far. More than 58% of all registered voters age 65 and over had returned their ballots as of Friday. That percentage declined for each descending age group, reaching a nadir with the youngest voters: Among 18- to 24-year-olds, only 13.3% had voted by Friday evening.
The secretary of state's office said it is hoping voter turnout statewide beats 2022, when 64% of eligible voters cast a ballot.
Voters are listening to election administrators and using drop boxes. Of the ballots turned in so far, nearly 70% arrived in a drop box, versus 30% by mail.
Jefferson County, spanning the central Olympic Peninsula from Port Townsend to the Pacific, is voting. More than half of Jefferson County voters, 55%, had voted by Friday, the highest percentage in the state by far.
Adams County, in Eastern Washington, is not. Just 22% of voters there have returned ballots, the lowest percentage in the state.
Ben Anderstone, a Seattle political consultant with Progressive Strategies NW, models the early vote, using various data sources to attempt to suss out the political leanings of who has voted. Because Washington does not have party registration, he has to look to other data, things like participation in past presidential party primaries (which is public information), past political donations and voter demographics.
It's an inexact science of estimating the likely party preference of who has already voted, but not necessarily who will vote or who anyone is voting for.
His models on Friday estimated that about 61% of votes cast so far were from Democratic voters, with about 39% from Republicans. That's about 2 points bluer than in 2024, when the Democratic presidential candidate, Kamala Harris, won Washington by 18 points.
"The electorate here is not looking as blue as in some other states," Anderstone wrote. If Republican areas continue to improve as they did late last week, "they'll have a mediocre but nearly average electorate." If King County ballots pour in, as they often do late in voting, Republicans will "have a rather difficult one.
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