The voter turnout in Tuesday’s election appeared to have a greater turnout as evidenced by many polling locations.

The polling location at Pioneer Elementary school in Auburn, South King County, serving 9 or 10 precincts, had about 340 voters at 2 p.m. In 2004, at the same time, the count was just about 240, an increase of 100 voters.

Looking around the auditorium there were people signing in while the booths were kept at greater than an 85 percent occupancy rate. Two empty booths were filled quickly.

Statistically the turnout, as usual, was not as great as one might instinctively expect.Washington had 3,629,851 registered voters with only 1.6 million bothering to vote. The percentage was 44.99 percent. The overall turnout is down from 2004.

The counties of King and Pierce with the highest number of registered voters had the lowest turnout rate with only a third or less of those registered actually voting.

King County with more than double over any other county had a third of its 1.2 million registered voters cast their ballots. Pierce County had just over a fourth of its 411,103 registered voters cast ballots.

For a visual, King County had one person voting for each three registered voters. Pierce County had one vote for every four registered.

The two counties with the highest turnout were Garfield and Skamania counties. Ferry County came in a very close third. All three counties had 4 voters casting ballots for every five persons registered to vote. Garfield County had the fewest registered voters, 1,564 with 1,278 voting. Skamania County has 6,646 registered with 5,300 casting votes. Ferry County had 3,368 voting out of 4,259 registered.

Washington’s voter turnout in 2004 was 82 percenet, nearly double of Tuesday’s turnout of 45 percent. There were 121,643 more registered voters this year. Actual Washington voters cast 1.2 million less ballots than were voted in 2004.

Roger W. Hancock writes for PoetPatriot.com