The 2008 general election Nov. 4 in King County is putting up some really big numbers.

Turnout could reach about 85 percent of the county’s roughly 1.1 million voters, which is what elections officials were predicting before the election.

“It’s amazing,” said elections chief Sherril Huff.

A turnout of about 85 percent would mean that the county counted about 940,000 ballots at the elections headquarters in Renton.

The vast majority of those votes were cast by mail.

There are 720,585 permanent absentee voters in the county and 385,380 poll voters. But starting next year the county moves to all-mail voting, although there still will be regional polling places.

Statewide, the turnout stands at about 75 percent and there are still 10s of thousands of ballots to count, mostly in King County.

This year’s general election was the biggest one since the 2004 election, in terms of registered voters, number of ballots issued and overall turnout, according to Huff.

The 2004 election was marred by lax procedures and mishandled ballots which brought into question the election of Gov. Christine Gregoire by just 129 votes statewide over Dino Rossi.

This time around, Gregoire beat Rossi by a comfortable 53 percent to 47 percent, at last count. Gregoire has declared victory and Rossi conceded.

All those 2008 ballots in King County meant a lot of work for the roughly 500 election workers at the elections headquarters.

Things seemed to go well, despite some minor problems.

“Overall, it was a good day, a good election,” Huff said of the election.

The difference has been planning and preparation – and the reforms that were put in place over the past four years, she said. She also said a “strong management team” has been assembled in the elections office, one that’s interested not just in building a “good elections office” but in setting standards by which elections are run.

Nor does it hurt that all the elections facilities are now under one roof, which has improved communications and built an esprit d’ corps among elections workers. The elections warehouse is expected to move to the Renton headquarters the first of the year.

Previously, elections workers and administrators were spread out in the Columbia Center in downtown Seattle, at the warehouse in Seattle and at the ballot-processing facility at Boeing Field.

Each election since the disastrous one in 2004 has had lessons learned, Huff said.

The registration rolls are “the cleanest they have ever been,” she said. A “huge difference” is the statewide elections database that has made it easy to track when a voter has moved to a new address.

“It’s remarkably different today from what it was four years ago,” she said.

Dean A. Radford is Editor of the Renton Reporter. Contact him at 425-255-3484, Ext. 5050 or dean.radford@rentonreporter.com.