Harger: Some voters in Hoquiam, Oakville and Raymond have to vote again. What a mess
Oct 26, 2026, 7:05 AM | Updated: 2:20 pm
If you’re one of 1,828 voters in Raymond, here’s your homework this week. Your ballot showed up without the library levy on it. You may have already filled it out, signed it, and dropped it off. Good for you. That ballot still counts. But a supplemental ballot with the library levy is on its way, and you have to send that one back too.
If you’re one of the Hoquiam or Oakville voters whose ballot was missing a levy, you’re getting a new ballot too. Fill out the new one and turn it in.
And if you live in Montesano, your ballot is fine. It’s your voters’ pamphlet that’s wrong. It told you a levy would raise your property taxes by 40 cents. The mayor said the real number is about $1.52 per $1,000 of assessed value. No new ballots are coming. You’ll just have to know that the official guide the county mailed you got it wrong.
So, to recap: some voters in one town send back a second ballot on top of the first. Some voters in two other towns get a new ballot to fill out. And a fourth town votes off a pamphlet with the wrong number in it. Got all that? Eight days before the general election.
This is a mess.
How we got here
In Hoquiam, the Timberland library levy was left off ballots because a 2011 annexation never made it into Grays Harbor County’s mapping system. Fifteen years. In Oakville, the Fire District 1 levy was left off too, and the fire district blamed “an error within the Grays Harbor County Elections Department.” Across the county line in Raymond, 1,828 voters got ballots without the library levy, because a 2015 annexation “was not correctly reported or recorded.”
And here’s the kicker in Pacific County: voters are choosing, on this very ballot, who runs their elections. The auditor’s race pits Nicole Deskins, appointed auditor last fall, against Dotsi Graves, the office’s election administrator since 2023. Both candidates are running the very office that let this slip through. Neither was in charge back in 2015, when that annexation went unrecorded. But they’re in charge now. At some point, catching a decade-old mistake before it lands in voters’ mailboxes is the job, and that’s on them.
None of this looks like fraud. It looks like sloppiness: old annexations nobody checked, a pamphlet nobody double-checked, and voters left to sort out the difference.
And this isn’t the first time Grays Harbor’s elections office has been in the headlines this year. In July, Judge Christine Schaller ordered the county to pay nearly $70,000 for withholding records about the 2023 election, a case over who got listed first in the Ocean Shores mayor’s race. She said that election was “not properly conducted.”
She saved her sharpest words for Auditor Joe MacLean and his elections administrator, Scott Turnbull. She said the court had uncovered “very unethical behaviors” and called their conduct “interference with the election process.”
She didn’t find their testimony credible. And when the county’s lawyer complained that the damages sought shocked the conscience, she shot back: “What really shocks the conscience is the behaviors of Auditor MacLean and Mr. Turnbull.”
To be fair, she also said she wasn’t ruling that election laws were broken. MacLean isn’t running for reelection. But he’s still the one running this election.
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Why this matters beyond the coast
There are voices out there who have spent years trying to convince people that our elections can’t be trusted. They don’t need evidence of fraud. They just need a story. And a county that mails out ballots missing measures, then asks some voters to vote twice and others to vote over again, hands them one.
Washington’s vote-by-mail system works when the people running it treat every ballot, every map, and every pamphlet like it matters, because it does. The last thing any election official should want is for anyone to have a reason to question anything about any election. I’m not an election denier. But these officials have got to stop handing the skeptics oxygen, however little of it this might be.
That goes from the top of state government on down. Under state law, county auditors run elections, but the Secretary of State has general authority over how they’re conducted, and an election review team that can examine a county’s procedures and visit its elections office. I wonder if it’s time to do exactly that in Grays Harbor and Pacific counties. And I wonder whether every county in the state ought to be checking its own old annexations against its ballot maps before the next election, not after.
If you’re one of these voters
Raymond: When your supplemental ballot arrives, fill it out and send it back, even if you already voted. Both ballots count.
Hoquiam and Oakville: Fill out the new ballot and send it back, no matter what you’ve already done. If you have questions, call the Grays Harbor County Auditor’s Office.
Montesano: Your ballot is correct, but the levy figure in the voters’ pamphlet isn’t. Check with the city before you decide.
Election Day is Tuesday, Nov. 3. Don’t let somebody else’s mistake cost you your vote.
Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here.
