Whatcom ballots are taking longer to count. Here’s why
Last-minute voters and the lingering effects of last week’s windstorm were slowing the ballot-counting process in the general election, Whatcom County Auditor Diana Bradrick said.
Winds gusting at 50 to 60 mph that knocked out power to tens of thousands of Puget Sound-area electrical customers on Friday, Nov. 4, also disrupted the fiber-optic connections to the state’s voter database, Bradrick said in a statement emailed Wednesday, Nov. 9.
“Elections relies on connectivity to VoteWA to check in ballots and verify signatures — the first steps in processing ballots,” Bradrick said.
“That system outage combined with a higher than average ballot return election week meant there was a lower percentage of tallied ballots in the Tuesday night results report than is typical for Whatcom County,” she said.
“As a result, most of the ballots collected over the weekend and on Monday (Nov. 7) were not able to be processed,” she said.
Some 25,000 ballots at the Auditor’s Office hadn’t been tallied after the election deadline of 8 p.m. Tuesday, Nov. 8, Bradrick said.
“That does not include the ballots collected from the drop boxes on Wednesday and the mail delivered Wednesday morning,” she said.
“As of Wednesday morning, the office is able to process ballots, but VoteWA signature-checking is experiencing slow performance which will continue to impact how quickly the ballots can be processed. We are working diligently to get the ballots processed as quickly as possible,” Bradrick said.
Slow processing may have skewed the early voter turnout numbers, which showed that a little more than half of Whatcom County’s 157,580 registered voters had returned their ballots through 5 p.m. Tuesday, up from just over one-third of voters who had done so by 5 p.m. Monday.
About 91,000 ballots were shown as “returned” at 1 p.m. Wednesday on the Auditor’s Office website.
A second round of ballot count totals was scheduled for 5 p.m. Wednesday.
