March 1, 2006
King County Executive Ron Sims hails passage of bill changing the date of the primary
King County Executive Ron Sims offered his strong support for the state Legislature's decision today to move the date of the primary to one month earlier, from the third Tuesday in September to the third Tuesday in August.
"I commend the Legislature for their bipartisan leadership on this extremely important development that will benefit the voters of the state," Executive Sims said. "This is a much-needed reform King County has called on the Legislature to enact for a long time. Moving the primary date took on renewed urgency for us when we adopted it as a key component of our plans to transition to all-mail balloting in King County."
The bill, ESB 6236, passed the state House today with overwhelming bipartisan support. The final vote on the measure was 94 to 3. Having previously been approved by the Senate, the bill now goes to Governor Gregoire’s desk, and she is expected to sign the bill into law.
Executive Sims announced in December that King County would move to all-mail elections, a move that will make it the largest government entity in the nation to conduct elections by mail. With a need to process up to one million ballots in each election, the current short lag time between primary and general elections would put huge strains on election administrators and staff, and heighten the possibility of processing errors, in a jurisdiction the size of King County. Now that bottleneck has been removed.
"Our transition plans to all-mail balloting are moving forward as well as we could have hoped," Sims said. "We are on track to soon offer voters the enhanced security, convenience and efficiency of a vote-by-mail system."