King County Elections certified results Nov. 24 from the county’s first all-mail General Election, completely accounting for all ballots received and processed at their temporary offices in Tukwila.

Final numbers show that 587,198 ballots were returned, for a turnout of 53.55 percent of the 1,096,639 registered voters.

“Turnout was slightly lower than we projected, but right in line with other odd-year General Elections,” said . “It’s nice to see a substantial number of voters turn out, given how important the candidates on the ballot are; like the Executive, many city mayors and council members, and others who affect the day-to-day lives of King County voters.”

The turnout numbers show that while more ballots were cast, however, a drop of half a percent point of registered voters voted in 2009 compared to the last major off-year general election in 2005 when the county executive and Seattle mayor were up for re-election.

Voters in both Issaquah and Sammamish were seemingly less enthusiastic than the county average. Only 8,220 residents in Issaquah and 13,168 Sammamish voters mailed their ballots back, barely topping 50 percent of registered voters.

The certified results feature another notable first in which election administrators can boast of achieving six sigma standards to benchmark discrepancies between the number of mail ballots received and the number of mail ballots tabulated. The county interprets this performance to mean no more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities. In 2009, it detected only two discrepancies from a total of 1,193,209 ballots received over the past year.

“This really is a testament to how much work has gone into streamlining our procedures and how accountable our process has become over the years,” said Huff. “It is such an accomplishment for the department to have met these standards as we prepare to continue to benchmark our successes with these standards in the years to come.”

The electronic canvass of results, broken down by precinct will be available online by 4:30 p.m. on Tuesday, Dec. 1.

King County’s post-election, random audit of 4 percent of accessible voting units (or electronic voting equipment) used at accessible voting centers resulted in a perfect match between the electronic vote totals and the paper audit trail. First introduced in the May 2006 special election, all manual audits of King County’s accessible voting units have been 100 percent accurate to date.

New for all-mail elections, a manual audit of mail ballots is conducted. Twenty batches, representing 4,338 ballots were hand-counted and compared to the machine count. All batch audits conducted have also been 100 percent accurate to date.

Visit King County Elections for more information on the November 3 General Election.