America is a place of convenience. It’s where, if we so choose, we can have our groceries delivered to our doorstep and purchase clothes and home furnishings from the convenience of a laptop. It’s where people sell electric abdomen stimulators, those belts that allegedly turn your belly into a six-pack while you watch television (although many doubt their effectiveness). So the argument against appeasing the lazy and apathetic is moot.
That’s just one criticism of municipalities that have switched to an all-mail system where the voters receive and return ballots to their postman or a drop box instead of driving across town to a polling station. Montana Secretary of State Linda McCulloch says she will propose a bill to the next Legislature that would switch the state to mail-only ballots.
Critics have warned of voter fraud in all-mail voting, but where the system in is in place – in Oregon and nearly all of Washington state – most of those fears have been unfounded. And look at the alternative: Lest we forget, during the 2008 election, polling problems were reported across the country (as happens in almost every major election).
That November night, in a suburb of St. Louis, machines malfunctioned and polling stations had hours-long lines. Dozens of lawsuits were filed in Ohio, Virginia and Indiana. Accusations of voter intimidation were rampant. There were reports of broken touch-screen machines and computer glitches and people claiming they were registered but whose names were not on the list. This cycle will repeat in 2012. This, apparently, is the perfect system that we must uphold.
There are other misconceptions about all-mail voting; one is that it somehow benefits one party over another. When King County, home to Seattle, first proposed all-mail voting both conservative and liberal activists opposed the move. And since its implementation, several studies have been released attempting to measure its effectiveness.
Project Vote, a voting rights organization that is against all-mail voting, has argued that voting by mail “may favor affluent voters.” It continues:
To the extent that voting by mail increases turnout in Oregon it does so by retaining voters who are occasional rather than habitual voters. Further, these voters are demographically similar to habitual voters. In other words, voting by mail does nothing to expand the electorate in ways that make it more representative of the voting age population.
Also, during a presentation to the American Political Science Association, researchers found that in Oregon there was little noticeable impact on voter turnout when it switched to an all-mail system. Still other research suggests that voting by mail may boost turnout, but only for low-profile elections.
But both Washington Secretary of State Sam Reed and Oregon Secretary of State Kate Brown are sold on the system. They traveled to D.C. earlier this year to urge Congress to help other states switch to all-mail voting. Both maintain that the system has increased participation and reduced costs.
The latter should be carefully considered here when taking into account Montana’s far-flung polling stations, which are expensive to staff. And you have to imagine the mail system would benefit rural voters on a snowy Tuesday in November.
But perhaps the most convincing argument is the number of Montana voters already choosing to cast ballots before Election Day. Since 2000, the percentage of those filling out absentee ballots statewide has increased from 15 percent to 54 percent. In Flathead County, the number has now reached 46 percent.
About half of voters are already casting their ballots outside a polling station. Making voting more convenient, saving money and, perhaps, increasing turnout seems like legislation that would be easy to support.