Spin control: Close primary contests partly decided by voters who opted to skip races

With the state headed for a hand recount of the lands commissioner race and several Spokane area legislative primaries settled by nail-biting margins, it seems time to look at one of the biggest failures that candidates and their campaigns make.

It’s not a failure to find eligible residents who aren’t registered and sign them up. It’s not failing to persuade marginally motivated voters to mark and mail their ballots after they’ve signed up.

It’s failing to connect with voters who are already determined to vote not skip their race entirely and fill in the oval for them.

Even in a primary, when the selection of candidates is the most extensive – and in some cases, most unusual – thousands of voters skip races. It’s most common in a race that has only one option, leading some voters to wonder “Why bother?” and others of one political persuasion to refuse to vote for a candidate of the other persuasion.

In those cases, an unmarked race, technically known as an “undervote,” doesn’t matter.

In a close race like the race for second place in the lands commissioner primary between Democrat Dave Upthegrove and Republican Sue Kuehl Pedersen, they are one of the reasons the state is getting ready to count 1,994,096 ballots by hand.

After a surge in the late vote tallies, Upthegrove currently leads Pedersen by 52 votes. That’s less than two votes per county. It’s narrower than the final margin in the 2004 governor’s race, which finished with Christine Gregoire up by 133 votes over Dino Rossi after two recounts and a court fight.

But more than 90,000 voters statewide – and 6,400 in Spokane County alone – left the lands commissioner race blank. Either they didn’t care about the office, which is in charge of state lands and much of the efforts to fight wildfires, or they didn’t like any of their seven options.

It was the third most skipped-over statewide race, but the only one in which the voters who didn’t pick a candidate could have made the difference.

Pederson topped the race in Spokane County, but if she had picked up just 10% of those undervotes, she’d be comfortably ahead for the recount. Had Upthegrove, who won King County, picked up 10% of the more than 24,000 undervotes in the race in that county he’d be out of recount territory.

Undervotes also could have changed the second-place spot in three Spokane legislative races. Natasha Hill finished 270 votes ahead of Ben Stuckart for a 3rd District House seat, where 1,101 voters skipped the race. Leonard Christian finished 203 votes ahead of Mike Kelly in the 4th District Senate race; 1,395 voters left those choices blank. Ted Cummings finished 482 votes ahead of Brandi Peetz for the open 4th District House seat, which had 1,638 undervotes.

Voters who leave a race blank often just need a little push. Candidates should think of them as Costco shoppers. They’re signed up as members, and they’re in the store for something else. They just need a little extra incentive – maybe a small sample of something good – to put that candidate for that race in their cart on the way to checkout.

Maybe they need a pronunciation guide

Former President Donald Trump has taken some well-deserved criticism for mispronouncing the first name of his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris. He seems to insist on calling her “ka-MAH-LAH” (although somehow for a while he was spelling it Kamablah).

But if the Democratic National Convention is any guide, he isn’t the only one struggling with the name. Some during the roll call of the states may have picked up the mispronunciation from Trump. Others said “CAM-uh-lah.” One seemed to have dromedaries on the mind and said “Camel-ah.”

This despite the fact that her stepchildren were shown in a video saying that they have a name-rhyming nickname of “MOMMA-lah.”

For those who need visual clues, don’t think of an engine part connected to a shaft or a humpy-backed mammal useful for desert travel. Think of a punctuation mark used to separate a dependent clause and the sixth note in the “Doe, A Deer” song. As in “, la” and you’ll be fine.