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So, I voted. I don’t remember the exact day, but it was sometime in early October. California allows residents to sign up for permanent vote-by-mail. They get their ballot a month in advance and can then mail it back in. You can vote with all the materials in front of you, you don’t have to wait in line, you can mull over your vote for a while and hold your mail-in ballot until the final weekend if you want, or even the final day (you can turn it in to any polling place). And it works extremely well. So well, in fact, that the majority of California citizens will vote this way in 2012, as they did in past elections.
In Washington and Oregon, all voting is 100% by mail. There are collection boxes around the state for the procrastinators. It doesn’t require new technologies or expensive voting machines. Just the architecture that’s been in existence across the country since the Pony Express.
As we continue to hear stories year after year about long lines and malfunctioning voter machines and even the fever swamp stories on the right about scary black people intimidating everyone at the polls, it’s impossible to envision a better system for voting than just doing it by mail. It’s so intuitive that you would wonder why we would EVER do it another way. Those worried about security should be just as worried about voting machines that flip votes and have no verifiable paper trail. A vote by mail is a verifiable paper ballot that’s easy for recounting. Could some enterprising sort steal all the mailed ballots and flip an election? They’d have to correctly forge every signature, which in California are cross-checked against signatures on file with the voter registration or at the DMV. (We should have universal voter registration, by the way.)
I’m sure if you really thought hard about it you could come up with some foolproof way to rig the vote. That said, this method of voting has not caused one scandal in Washington and Oregon. All it’s done is increase voter participation, in the most civilized fashion possible. The voters don’t have to worry about taking off time from work or waiting in a long line. The vote-counters can parcel it out in bite-sized chunks over a month, increasing accuracy and ending the process of long nights after an election. Courtrooms don’t have to be clogged with all these ridiculous lawsuits trying to disenfranchise people.
Yes, it would be less “fun.” You wouldn’t get your “I Voted” sticker. Pundits couldn’t speculate about an October surprise, because the impact would lessen. But 31 million Americans voted before Election Day this year, and that didn’t tamp down speculation or punditry. The republic would survive having a sustainable, civilized, intuitive election system.
What’s more, the struggling but also amazing US Postal Service would be eligible for Help America Vote Act funding!
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As an Oregonian, I salute you. We all love our vote by mail. And we all look at the rest of the country kind of in amazement.
I have loads of family on the East Coast. I preach to them about this every 4 years. Still hoping to get through the ‘we’ve always done it this way’ mind-set somehow, someday.
Bad, bad, BAD, BAD idea.
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6003
You don’t hear about anything bad… so what could possibly go wrong?
http://www.bradblog.com/?p=9687
i’m of two minds on this one. otoh i like the idea of taking my time, being able to dogpile/google various candidates and issues from the privacy of my own home and vote at my own pace. otoh brad isn’t wrong; the fact that i’m mailing off something and i have no idea who is counting it, or with what machines (if any), and that i can’t have signed ‘voting day’ card to go with my ballot to prove that yes, i was actually voting and that’s my signature that says so… well, all that has the potential to be exploited.
i guess i really don’t understand why it’s so hard for so many people to admit: the old way worked just fine. the trick is to have smaller, better funded precincts in which everyone uses their own hand to mark a piece of paper that is then stored in one place until counted and then sent off to one central place where it may be recounted on demand. my dad actually ordered a recount for one of his elections, back in the paper day, and it wasn’t that big of a deal at all. there could even be a system in place in which we make sure there are always enough election workers in the same way we make sure there are always people in a jury pool. voting is the ultimate “civic duty” and i wish we’d take that more seriously.
i would be in favor of mandatory voting by mail if machines were not involved in counting them.
Even though Nate Silver has me convinced the Dems have this thing bagged, and even though I have little brief for Obama, I am still going to remain tense as crap until I know that Romney is not the GD president. That guy is the contemporary face of vacuous hell on earth.
‘You don’t hear about anything bad…’
Not true. In Oregon we do hear about what goes wrong… and we also see our county officials jumping on it right away. The woman in the most recent case will probably go to jail and face an enormous fine.
I wish the same could be hoped for with the corrupt mess at the polling places in the non-mail states.
The issue that is occurring in vote-by-mail states is signature invalidation, especially of long-term (i.e. aging) voters.
Agoraphobics and germophobes love it as well.
I’ve voted by mail for years in CA. I have no idea if my votes get counted or not. I’d like to think so, but seems like, any way you do it, it’s a crap-shoot.
My acquaintances and friends who still vote at the booth report looooong lines, plus the usual slowness factor of the poll workers who seem to have spelling deficiencies (eg, have a terrible time finding names on an alphabetized list) out the whazooo.
I’ll stick with voting by mail. I sent in my ballot about 10 days ago after I took my own sweet time researching everything.
On the whole, I agree with chicago dyke above, but if you live overseas, permanent absentee voter status and timely mailing of ballots is essential. After years of being disenfranchised, most annoyingly during the Gray Davis recall, I can finally count on getting my ballot in time to return it before an election, but it took until 2004.
Doesn’t your county have vote-by-mail tracking?
I don’t think I would ever vote by mail unless that was my only way. I don’t trust it getting there.
Yep! I can’t imagine my elections staff doing anything but follow the law. I do know them and they are fully committed to doing a good job.
Signatures on Washington State ballots are checked. Political parties can still by the list of voters and challenge.
The only concern I would have for some is the controlling spouse that insists on checking the other spouse’s ballot. I didn’t open my husband’s ballot and he sealed it up after filling out as I did with mine.
Why do you think the corporatists ( most politicians ) want to privatize the postal service? As we are seeing all across the country today casting your ballot is becoming harder, and, untraceable to boot. As Ted Rall says, ” the biggest myth in America is not that we are a democracy but that the rest of the world wants to be like us “. Our voting laws are right up there with the MIC as reasons for their disdain. Who among us can blame them, today of all days, witnessing this overt racism masquerading as a nat’l election? Shame on us.
It’s a well meaning idea. So why am I uncomfortable with it?
I’m not comfy even with just paying my MasterCard by mail. Too many things can happen between the mailbox and the destination, which I can’t see. Paying online I can see the payment within a day or so.
But what about a ballot, which isn’t something we do frequently? How do we ensure our vote is actually counted? Maybe there will be a serial number, or some such, to check online after a reasonable interim for the Postal Service to do its thing. Suppose it gets lost in the mail, though, and we forget to check that our certain ballot has been received and recorded?
I don’t think there could be enough safeguards by mail to make it a better option. What goes on now is bad enough, but by mail could be even worse and just as liable for tampering or simple error as what we have now.
I like the idea of voting in person, too. On one day. It just shouldn’t be Tuesday. It should be Sunday or a Monday holiday. I learned today that the reason we vote on the first Tuesday after the first Monday is that back in the 1840s, when the improvement in communications made it necessary for all states to elect their presidential electors on the same day (otherwise states would have an incentive to be the last state to vote to extract some strategic concessions)people had to vote in the county seat. Sunday was out because it was God’s day. Monday was out, too, because some people couldn’t make it to the County Seat after praying all day and into the night on Sunday. Wednesday was market day, which all things considered would have been a good day to combine with an election. Maybe too much liquor. I dunno. But Tuesday turned out to be the compromise choice.
Time for a change. We’ll never see it.
As to voting by mail, it is certainly convenient, especially when you are permanently absentee. But the symbolism of standing in line with your neighbors at the precinct poll is powerful. It is an act of affirmation. We need more smaller precincts.
And if you had passed away in the mean time, you would have been a real dead person voting. (Nothing wrong with that, by the way).
In Oregon, you can go online to be sure your ballot was received.
As a relatively new Oregon resident, I do like the time to ponder my choices with the ballots and info in front of me – especially the endless initiatives. But I do miss the feeling of community at the polling place. As a substitute I have been getting together with a small group of friends to watch the debates and talk about the issues. Should have done that before.
Thanks, Teddy, for pointing out you can check to see if your ballot has been received. I didn’t know that and just confirmed it.
Also in Calif. or at lest in my county SJ
I’m a 25 year Washington resident and love the voting by mail even though the ballots are counted by optical machine instead of human hands. As far as the postal service goes, I’ve been paying all my bills by mail for 30 years and not one piece of mail has ever been lost.
We need a National Voter Rights Law that establishes voting by mail by paper ballot hand counted by citizens, other nations do this…. we Americans clearly want to make it hard as fuck to vote.
Wow. I wonder which party can pull in that demographic?
Obama 332-206. That’s my prediction.
Works for me. Montana has open absentee voting and once you are on the list, they send the absentee ballot to you every year. I voted two weeks ago and it only cost me 60 cents for postage.
I’m with you Laura. Now with two weeks of early voting in Texas, ain’t no real reason not to vote.
I think dead people should be able to vote. THey got skin in the game, just not as much as you and me.
I’m still a skeptic.
Maybe I’ll feel better about this if I get it on the record. Here in New Mexico it seemed things were really improving, two third parties on the ballot for President, and a big ad in the Albuquerque Journal October 22nd sponsored by a number of organizations including Common Cause which clearly states in huge letters JUST VOTE and says you have the right to a provisional ballot if there’s any question – anywhere in New Mexico if you are a registered voter. Apparently all the County Clerks have a different idea, so my son, not registered in my county where he’s been living more than a year, was refused when we went down to vote, even though he had his registration with him, even though the ad says in print “you cannot be turned away.” He was. So now, he’s driving down to the county he’s registered in, 120 miles round trip. (We did call the hotline and got his case on there.)
So, voting by mail looks mighty good to me now – that community togetherness thing didn’t do so well for us.
Vote by mail is the cats patoot! I thought I would miss going to the polls, but I never ever have. We have some issues but very few.
Hey, we DO get an “I Voted” sticker. It’s in the pamphlet we get with our ballots!
I LOVE voting by mail, but then, I trust my local officials.
I hope that if this is a squeaker, that two things will happen:
1. People will seriously start to review vote by mail or other improvements to the existing systems.
2. There will be a serious look at getting rid of the Electoral College.
An Oregon Green seconding your enthusiastic support of vote-by-mail.
Only caveat: Oregon is a “clean” politics state. We have very few scandals at all, because the voters punish them severely. It would be more of a challenge in, say, Chicago. But then, any system is.
There is a fairly obvious solution to the stunt that woman in Clackamas County pulled (filling unvoted positions – straight Republican). For each position, there should be an extra bubble that says “Not voting this position.” You still have the undervote, which I think is legitimate, but no ambiguity to invite cheating.
I always drop my family’s ballots in the box at the county courthouse. Gives me a nice little ritual, and I know the county actually has it. And saves 3 stamps.
Anyway, you can’t mail it on Nov. 5th.