Washington's State-of-the Art Voting Information System

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With many close races yet to be determined and thousands of ballots still to count, voters, members of the media, policymakers, and others have been scouring state and local election websites trying to get the most up-to-date results. While the quality of these sites varies, some states, such as Washington, excel at using their websites to provide voters, local election officials, and researchers with valuable data on voter registration and election results in an information-rich and intuitive way.

The Washington Secretary of State’s home page (vote.wa.gov) features a clear link to the election results. From there, users can quickly and easily find election results for all ballot measures and races and view them in a richly colored map of the state as well as track the estimated number of ballots still to be counted as election night goes on.

According to the secretary’s office, on Election Day, 257,309 different people visited the site 295,563 times and, in total, viewed 2,435,393 pages. These figures represent a dramatic increase over Election Day 2008 when 53,335 different people visited the site 80,857 times and viewed a total of 507,458 pages.

The state also offers a mobile phone application that provides results for the latest election, updating immediately whenever a county reports a new tabulation. The Washington State mobile “app” was at one point the fourth most-downloaded app for iOS devices on Election Day. Overall, the app was downloaded 26,560 times Tuesday:

• iOS (iPad, iPod Touch, and iPhone) – 16,866 installs/downloads
• Android – 9,694 installs/downloads

This is in addition to the several thousand downloads that occurred at the August primary.

Washington, which conducts elections entirely by mail, also allows voters to track the status of their registration and ballot and locate drop boxes online.