Witnessing WDFW’s 2025 Special Permit Draw

As Washington hunters sat on pins and needles earlier this week prodding WDFW’s special permits website in hopes of seeing they’d been drawn, I got a backdoor glimpse into how the agency awards the tags.

Me and another observer were allowed to witness the draws for two hunt categories and see how WDFW licensing and IT managers validate results for tens of thousands of hunters, as well as to learn how the agency and its contractor have improved the process following 2024’s snafu.

The only caveat was that I was asked not to publish anything until after the results were officially published Tuesday, even as some Evergreen State sportsmen noticed that the draw appeared to be under way as far back as Monday, which corresponded to when permits for 25 of the 27 hunt categories were actually chosen and validated.

“We don’t want the hunters to think this is a mystery, but there’s a method to our madness,” explained Kim Pritchard, IT business analyst for WDFW’s WILD system, on Tuesday morning, when the final categories were drawn.

Part of that madness, as you can imagine, is that with on the order of 40,000 hunters having put in this year for everything from quality elk tags in the Blues to once-in-a-lifetime bull moose permits in the Selkirks, and from one of just seven South Cascades goat permits to plentiful antlerless blacktail tags in the islands, WDFW’s mainframe was expected to get a workout as results were eagerly queried, plans for time off work this fall could be firmed up and word of successful draws was relayed down the line to hunt group members.

One thing I didn’t realize beforehand is that as hunters feverishly hit refresh over and over to try and get a jump on results, it actually bogs down WDFW’s system by having to revalidate their date of birth, hunter ed certification and hunt choices each and every time. Individually, it probably doesn’t slow things down much, but collectively apparently is another matter.

Meanwhile, the agency’s computer is also dealing with, well, dealers, some 600 of which across Washington are trying to sell annual freshwater fishing licenses, one-day combos, two-rod endorsements, etc., etc., etc., at the same time as the results are being posted. The system’s fast in usual times, but when so many people are using it, things slow down.

PRITCHARD ACKNOWLEDGED THAT HUNTERS can get irritated and frustrated, but firmly in the back of her mind and others this week was last year, when a predraw indexing of the system to increase its performance changed how the results were subsequently read by the computer.

“It was one line of code, but it completely changed the outcome of those draws in some of the hunts,” explained Evan Yett of Brandt Information Systems, which contracts with WDFW to run the draw.

As WDFW put it in a special director’s statement last July, “Some hunt applicants were assigned the wrong special hunt permit, some hunt applicants were not assigned a special hunt permit when they should have been drawn (i.e., shown as ‘not selected’), and some hunt applicants were assigned a special hunt permit (i.e., shown as ‘selected’) when they should not have been drawn.”

All totaled, 723 applicants who should have been selected but initially weren’t were ultimately awarded the special permit they should have received, while 738 who were incorrectly chosen were still allowed to hunt that tag if it was “biologically feasible” for the herd or they saw their results change.

According to WDFW staffers yesterday, 2024’s problem was actually first pointed out by one of their game wardens who had put in for a second deer tag and should have been drawn because the special permit opportunity went “undersubscribed,” that is, fewer people put in for it than there were available tags, typical for units with little public land.

“Oops; Houston, we have a problem,” is how Pritchard described that moment to Jake Weise, the other observer on Tuesday’s draw and a member of WDFW’s Game Management Advisory Council as well as a Boone & Crockett associate.

As they checked quality elk permit results last June, they saw that the first 50 were right, but well down the list they found an incorrectly awarded permit. No errors were found in previous years’ draws, a subsequent review found.

So, part of yesterday’s walk-through was to demonstrate what WDFW had learned and show how it validated this year’s draw. Specifically, it involved witnessing the awarding of permits for the second deer and ewe sheep categories, maybe not the sexiest of hunts but ones with pretty good odds of putting meat in the freezer.

PER WDFW, A TOTAL OF 14,021 HUNTERS purchased second deer applications this year, with 12,520 actually submitting those apps (the other 1,501 essentially went for the point saver option) for 2,272 antlerless tags spread across 79 hunt choices, which correspond to either game management units or special deer hunt areas.

Even as the draw represented “a big day” for both hunters and WDFW – for the latter, it was the culmination of district biologists’ permit level recommendations last winter, headquarters staff review, sign-off by the director, publication in the 2025 big game hunting pamphlet, the formal hunter application period, and app vetting – the actual mechanics of it were “a little bit boring,” in the words of agency staffers.

“We push the button, the computer does its thing,” said one.

“I don’t have Jeopardy wait music,” added another after the “Execute” button was pushed.

About a minute or two later, the results came back. They showed that 1,954 permits had tentatively just been awarded, 1,523 of which were for the first choice unit of hunters, 262 for their second choice, 97 for third and 72 for fourth.

While the actual running of the draw is fast, in the lead up to it WDFW had spent a lot of time double checking that applicants could actually apply for the various hunts in this and other categories – that is, did they qualify as, say, a youth or were they really over 65 and thus eligible to put in for hunts under parameters in the Washington Administrative Codes?

And following Tuesday’s second deer draw, staffers started looking at individual hunt results to see if it all still added up. They checked out hunt choice 1419, East Okanogan, for which five antlerless whitetail tags are available this fall.

Those were awarded to numbers 7, 8, 14, 24 and 25 in the overall ranking of all second deer applicants. All had made the beautiful highlands unit their first hunt choice – for four, it was their only choice – and they burned 11, 5, 7, 8 and 11 points, respectively, to win their permits. The relatively high point values are reflective of strong demand to hunt a landscape featuring a good mix of public and private ground.

Going backwards in time for a moment, those hunter rankings were determined by an earlier draw. It established the order of hunters for the category and is based in part on how many points they had from putting in and not being drawn in past years. That figure is squared and used to generate a corresponding set of random numbers (so, three points are worth nine ranking numbers). The lowest one of those ranking numbers for each hunter was then used to come up with a ranked list of all who put in for the category. Building up lots of points gives you better odds of pulling a low ranking number, but doesn’t guarantee that someone with fewer points won’t get a lower number still. The above graphic and a WDFW video explain it better.

Tuesday, to test that there weren’t flaws in the second deer draw, staffers looked down the list to ensure that others who had made East Okanogan their first choice hadn’t been selected before the higher ranked quintet. A blue “Not selected” note showed up for the next person on the overall list, the hunter ranked number 70, and when the results were specifically queried for just “hunt choice 1419” and “first choice,” only the first five hunters popped up, helping to validate the draw.

“So the system is doing what it is designed to do,” said Pritchard.

Congrats, JM, MS, SC, KT and DL – and good luck!

At Weise’s suggestion, WDFW dug into an undersubscribed hunt – hunt choice 1434, Orcas. Only 80 of the 135 tags were awarded, with 55 going unfilled due to a lack of applicants. Sixty-three of the 80 lucky hunters had made it their first choice, 20 their second. Those awarded it with their second choice had been below the cutoff point for tags for their first choice unit, and so on. Most hunters only needed one point to score the permit, but one person burned six.

Out of the blue, agency staffers decided to look up a result by last name, in this case for one of their own. Sadly, a certain Kelly Susewind wasn’t chosen for any of his second deer applications in three Okanogan units or one in Deep South Sound.

Better luck next year with those three points now in hand, Director – maybe put in for Orcas; I know a guy with a farm …

The other draw I witnessed yesterday involved ewe bighorn sheep, for which 8,146 applications had been purchased and 7,542 were submitted for all of four tags available in two hunts. It took up to 20 points to pull one, but also as few as nine.

AFTER SHOWING US THE DRILL, WDFW staffers indicated they planned to continue vetting the draws for both categories, as they’d done Monday with the other 25. Any errors they discovered in the pre-published results would allow them to call a draw back before it got loose in the wild like last year.

They were also going to go over results with an outside accounting firm, Davis Farr, another step WDFW added this year to validate the draw, according to licensing manager Peter Vernie.

“We try to improve the process every year,” noted Kristin Nielsen, project manager for the draw.

Here’s hoping that 2025’s draw came off completely correct and I’m not called to the stand as a material witness. Good luck to everyone who was drawn, and better luck next year to those who weren’t!