Election Day is upon us as we go to press on Tuesday with this week’s Beachcomber. It will all be decided by the time you read this editorial.

So we’re asking you now: Did you vote? And how do you feel about what happened?

A lot was at stake for Vashon on the ballot.

King County’s Veterans, Seniors and Human Services Levy — which has provided funding for the Vashon Food Bank, Vashon Senior Center, Vashon Youth & Family Services, Vashon HouseHold, The DOVE Project, Vashon Care Network and the Vashon Veterans Association — was up for renewal. We truly hope that we can report, in next week’s newspaper, that it passed resoundingly.

An important primary race for a seat on the Vashon School Board was also on the ballot — a contest we chronicled closely on these pages. We’ll continue that coverage: November’s general election will determine who fills four seats on the five-person board — a possible sea change in leadership for our district.

And then, of course, there’s Vashon Island Fire & Rescue’s (VIFR) ballot measure for a levy lid lift.

We feel like we needed to buy ink by the barrel to cover that topic in recent weeks.

The levy lid lift has been hotly debated on our opinion pages, with The Beachcomber weighing in with an endorsement of the measure. Buoyed by our conviction that VIFR’s new administration would steward the levy dollars wisely, we urged voters to approve the lid lift, calling it critical to our district’s need to upgrade its aging fleet and increase its staff to better serve islanders in their greatest hours of need.

Not everyone agreed.

But by the time readers hold this issue in their hands, it will have finally been decided.

We already know, though, that islanders have cared about this primary.

We’ve been following a set of infographics provided by King County Elections at tinyurl.com/5xkm6pt4, selecting our local races in a pulldown that allows us to slice the returns by age, precinct, and more.

As of Tuesday morning at 6 a.m. Vashon’s voter turnout, at 31.3 percent, was way ahead of any other election area. Our closest rival, Mercer Island School District, was at 24 percent. But others were much lower than that.

Diving deeper, we discovered that several of Vashon’s precincts were approaching (but still short of) 40 percent, as of Tuesday morning. At that time, Shawnee and Burton were the highest turnout precincts on Vashon, at 38.2 and 37.7 percent, respectively. That compared to central Vashon at 23.5 percent, although other precincts were well over 30 percent.

The two simultaneous Vashon-specific contests connected to our school and fire districts no doubt boosted turnout on Vashon.

But what drew South Vashon and Maury voters to turn out in such numbers? Was the promise of a fully staffed Burton fire station — a key component of the fire district’s levy plan — an important draw? It’s hard to know. Maybe they were more interested in the school board race.

Age has also been a factor.

The senior vote was a huge percentage of Vashon’s turnout when we checked on Tuesday morning.

A stunning 59 percent of the ballots cast (1,715) came from voters ages 65 and older. Add in another 514 votes, cast by islanders 55-64, and the votes cast by those 55 and older totaled 77% of the total ballots cast on Tuesday morning.

Older voters of Vashon, well done.

Again, it’s hard to draw any conclusions about how much the levy lid lift decision influenced the age breakdown. But some might opine that older folks understand the value of having a VIFR ambulance come more quickly — although they also might be more likely to be concerned about property taxes on a fixed income.

An odd fact: we islanders love our ballot box at the Vashon Library. As of Tuesday morning, about 52 percent of Vashon ballots had been cast there, as opposed to by mail. That was way more than the county percentage of 34 percent cast at ballot boxes.

We should keep in mind that mail ballots always lag — but it is also easier for most of us to drive past the library than to pull into the post office.

Plus — dropping our ballots off at the library gives us an excuse to step inside. Our library is pretty fabulous.

On that, I think we can all agree.