EPHRATA — As of Tuesday, 35.78% of eligible voters in five Grant County school districts cast ballots in the February special election, according to the Grant County Auditor’s Office. That’s a preliminary estimate; it may change as additional ballots are counted.
Updated vote totals will be announced Friday afternoon. The election certification date is Feb. 21.
Kaylyn Orozco, an elections deputy with the Grant County Auditor’s office, said voter interest goes up and down depending on what’s on the ballot.
“People care more about presidential elections,” she said.
Voter turnout for primary and general elections in presidential years tends to be higher, she said. Special elections like school levies don’t get as much attention from voters.
Voters in the Moses Lake and Ephrata school districts were deciding the fate of educational programs and operations levies in Tuesday’s election. Wahluke School District voters were considering a request for a capital levy.
The MLSD proposal was passing as of Tuesday, with 5,911 votes in favor and 4,147 votes against. In Ephrata, participating voters cast 1,622 yes votes for the levy proposal and 842 no votes. Wahluke voters were rejecting the capital levy request, with 202 votes against and 147 votes in favor.
In Moses Lake, about 42.12% of eligible voters cast ballots as of Tuesday. The Moses Lake School District has 26,016 eligible voters and 10,058 of them cast ballots that had been counted Tuesday, according to the Grant County Auditor’s Office.
MLSD was the focus of a lot of attention over the last year, following the double rejection of a levy request in 2024 and the subsequent discovery of accounting errors and enrollment miscalculations that drained the district’s reserves.
As of Tuesday, 32.29% of eligible Ephrata School District voters had cast ballots in the special election. The district has 7,630 registered voters; in the preliminary results, 2,464 voters had cast ballots.
Ephrata voters approved a four-year replacement for the current EP&O levy that will expire at the end of 2025. The new levy term expires in December 2029.
Wahluke’s capital levy request drew the smallest number of voters. The district has 2,046 total voters in Grant County, and as of Tuesday 349 had cast ballots, for a ballot return rate of 17.06%.
Wahluke voters were rejecting a request for a three-year levy, most of which would pay off a loan taken out to replace the heating-cooling system at Mattawa Elementary. The remaining funds would upgrade the hardware for fire and security systems at the district’s three elementary schools and Wahluke Junior High.
To date, voter turnout is within a few percentage points of turnout in February special elections over the last five years.
Turnout was 36.04% in February 2020, which featured EP&O levy requests from five local school districts and levy requests from two hospital districts. One EP&O school levy request was on the ballot in February 2021, along with one capital levy request and a proposal from a fire district; that election drew 37.12% of voters in those districts.
Nine school districts had levy proposals or construction bonds on the ballot in February 2022. Some of those districts cover multiple counties, and in some cases none of the eligible voters in Grant County cast ballots. Voter turnout in February 2022 was 33.89%.
The February 2023 ballot featured multiple levy requests from the Odessa School District and an EP&O request from the Othello School District. Only a small portion of each district is in Grant County, with a total of 30 voters eligible in Grant County. Nobody from Grant County voted on the Othello levy. Voter turnout was 43.33% of eligible voters in Grant County, all in Odessa SD.
Eight school districts, one fire district and one city had proposals on the February 2024 ballot; from those, 30.69% of eligible voters cast ballots. That was the lowest turnout of the last five years.
