Greg Haker usually votes. He, his wife and mother-in-law had intended to vote in the August 4 primary. Their ballots were sitting on the counter of their Five Mile home when they evacuated on August 1.
In the rush, Haker said, the family grabbed important documents and some clothes. They forgot some of his mother-in-law’s medication.
They forgot the ballots, too.
The family would remain away from home for eight days. When Haker finally remembered the primary election on August 4, the deadline was hours away.
But he said the family still had other things to deal with, and there was not enough time to work out the logistics of printing replacement ballots and voting.
“By the time we realized we could have voted by printing out (ballots), we didn’t have time to go,” Haker said.
None of the three voted.
Across the county, voters living in areas affected by the Spokane Complex fires appear to have participated in this year’s primary at lower rates than they did in 2022.
More than 39% of ballots from 375,433 registered voters in Spokane County were returned in this year’s primary, compared with more than 40% turnout in 2022. But that relatively small change obscures larger declines in some fire-affected areas.
RANGE’s analysis of Spokane County election data estimates that turnout in areas covered by Level 2 or Level 3 evacuation notices on August 4 fell from about 45% in the 2022 primary to about 37% this year. The analysis estimated turnout based on the share of each precinct's land area inside evacuation zones. Outside those areas, turnout fell by less than half a percentage point.
Spokane County Auditor Vicky Dalton said the 2022 primary provides the closest comparison to this year’s election because both included state legislative and county commissioner races and had relatively similar precincts.
The analysis shows how turnout changed in areas affected by evacuation orders compared with the rest of the county, but it does not establish that the evacuations caused the decline.
Legislative District 6 — which includes the Rifle Club Road and Indian Trail areas affected by the Old Trails Fire, as well as areas affected by the Autumn Lane Fire — saw turnout decline by about four percentage points.
How RANGE analyzed turnout
Spokane County Auditor’s Office elections manager Ryan Dosch explained that between the August 2022 and August 2026 primaries, Spokane County precincts changed because of Spokane City Council redistricting, a Deer Park annexation and several precinct splits tied to voter population limits.
To make the elections comparable, RANGE estimated 2022 turnout using the 2026 precinct map.
Where a former precinct overlapped multiple current precincts, its registered voters and ballots were divided among them based on the share of the former precinct's land area falling within each current precinct. Those estimates were then combined to calculate turnout for each current precinct.
RANGE used the same area-based approach to compare turnout inside and outside estimated Level 2 and Level 3 evacuation zones as of August 4. For precincts partly covered by an evacuation zone, registered voters and ballots were divided according to the share of the precinct’s land area inside the zone.
This method assumes registered voters and ballots are distributed evenly throughout each precinct, so the geographic estimates are approximate.
The analysis estimates that the evacuation areas represented the equivalent of about 46,000 registered voters and 17,000 ballots cast in 2026, compared with about 43,000 registered voters and 20,000 ballots cast in the same areas in 2022.
In precinct 6312, which encompasses Rifle Club Road, just under 37% of registered voters cast ballots this year — nearly 12 percentage points below the estimated 2022 turnout. Precinct 6022, near the Autumn Lane Fire in the Charles Road area, saw turnout fall by about 13 percentage points to 37%. Both precincts were in the burn area.
Precinct 6316, which includes the Indian Trail branch of Spokane Public Library, saw turnout decline by about 10 percentage points, with 34% of registered voters participating in this year’s primary.
“For those areas that were evacuated, there’s still a pretty significant impact,” Dalton said.
Voting during the evacuations
Nearly 58% of Spokane County voters who returned ballots this year used ballot drop boxes, while about 42% voted by mail, according to the Washington Secretary of State. But evacuation orders and road closures complicated options for residents in fire-affected neighborhoods.
For voters in Indian Trail, one usual voting option was also closed earlier than usual. The drop box at the Indian Trail Library was inside a Level 3 evacuation zone, and Dalton said elections staff emptied and locked it on the morning of August 3.
Nine Mile resident Laura Wood and her husband ordinarily use a drop box near their home. But after the Autumn Lane Fire put their neighborhood under a Level 3 evacuation order, they never returned their ballots.
Wood and her family evacuated Saturday before returning home that night. Even after they returned, she said road closures made getting around difficult. Their usual route was blocked near Swenson Road and state Route 291, forcing residents to take a lengthy detour to leave the area.
“It was kind of a chaotic time,” Wood said. “It just was not top of mind.”
She and her husband never submitted their ballots.
Wood said she knew officials were encouraging residents to vote and offering alternatives, but the disruption of the fire changed their priorities. Because they remained under a Level 3 evacuation notice, they stayed close to home in case the fire shifted toward their house, she added.
“This has never happened in the whole time we’ve lived here,” she said. “So it was a little unsettling to say the least.”
Conrad Kurrle took a different route to voting.
When Kurrle left his Indian Trail home for a business trip on the morning of Friday, July 31, he left his empty ballot, voter guide and pen sitting on his dining room table. He planned to vote when he returned to Spokane the following Monday.
The next day, his home was placed under a Level 3 evacuation order.
As Kurrle spent the weekend checking the WatchDuty disaster monitoring app and Reddit for updates on the fires, returning home for his ballot seemed increasingly unlikely.
“If the evacuation levels dropped at all, then I knew that would be one of the things I would grab,” he said. “I would go home and I would grab and make sure that it was filled out and put in the mailer before 8 pm on Tuesday.”
When evacuation levels did not appear likely to drop in time, Kurrle saw on the Spokane subreddit that the elections office would be open. After returning to Spokane and staying with a friend, he stopped at the elections office when it opened at 7 am on Tuesday, received a replacement ballot, voted and left within 15 minutes, he said.
The county issued 4,208 replacement ballots this year. Spokane County Auditor’s Office elections manager Ryan Dosch said that was roughly in line with what the office expected and that the office did not see a large influx of people calling or seeking replacement ballots.
“If you were evacuated due to a fire, and if you hadn’t voted yet, probably the top of your list was not to get your ballot in,” Dosch said.
Dosch said ballot returns countywide tracked closely with 2022 throughout much of the election. A large spike in ballots processed the day after Election Day did not necessarily represent a surge of voters casting ballots after the fires began.
Changes in US Postal Service processing meant the elections office received fewer mailed ballots on Tuesday and a larger batch Wednesday, Dosch said. Wednesday was also when elections workers processed ballots collected from drop boxes at 8 pm on Election Day.
Dalton said some residents who remained inside evacuation zones even passed ballots across evacuation lines.
“They could hand stuff back and forth to each other, and that included ballots,” she said.
Many Spokane County voters had already cast their ballots before the fires began. Ballots were mailed between July 15 and 17, giving voters more than two weeks to return them before evacuations began on August 1. Returned ballots had to be postmarked by Election Day to be counted.
Kurrle said watching how the community and local government responded to the fires reinforced for him the importance of voting.
“When we’re faced with something like disaster, the choices that we make with our elected officials, they in fact determine how often these disasters may happen, and how we respond and then recover from them,” Kurrle said.
Haker, meanwhile, said an extension of the voting deadline might have helped people like his family, though he acknowledged that changing an election deadline during an emergency would have been complicated.
“It would have been nice to have a little extension,” he said. “But I understand the logistics of that would be difficult.”
When Haker and his family finally returned home, their ballots were still on the counter.
