2012 Election Snapshot Washington

2012 Election Snapshots

Over the past several months, Pew collected data about the 2012 presidential election from nearly every state and the District of Columbia. We used the findings to create a snapshot of each jurisdiction, focusing on how many people voted, how long they waited to cast their ballots, how they cast them, and how many ballots were not counted. These snapshots will be released over the coming months, five at a time, and the Election Data Dispatches will take a closer look at the latest snapshots each week.

2012 Election Snapshot - Washington

November 2012 was the first presidential election in which all voting in Washington state was done entirely by mail. The state’s two most populous counties, King and Pierce, still offered polling-place voting in the 2008 presidential election.

These two counties also had the most dramatic drop in the number of provisional ballots issued:

• King County issued nearly 34,000 provisional ballots in 2008, but only 1,114 in 2012.
• Pierce County issued more than 10,000 in 2008, and just 1,382 in 2012.

Statewide the number of provisional ballots dropped from 54,047 in 2008 to 6,832 in 2012.