Interest Builds in Oregon's Vote-By-Mail System

Other methods - Some states ponder alternate balloting after recent election-day glitches
Monday, October 23, 2006 / JEFF KOSSEFF / The Oregonian

Oregon's pioneering vote-by-mail system is gradually spreading across the country.

Oregon remains the only state where every county offers only mail-in ballots, but more than 20 other states allow residents to cast absentee ballots without providing an excuse. In Washington, all but five counties use vote-by-mail. And in Arizona, voters will decide this year whether to move to mail-in balloting statewide.

Amid concerns of the election-day glitches that plagued Florida in 2000, Ohio in 2004, and Maryland during last month's primaries, elections officials are searching for a different way of receiving votes.

"We're seeing an enormous surge of interest from elected officials and elections officials," said Adam Smith, executive director of the Vote by Mail Project, a Portland-based group aiming to spread Oregon's system nationally. "This year, the lights seemed to go on all over the country."

To capitalize on the interest, last month Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., introduced a bill to provide as much as $110 million in grants for states to switch to mail elections.

"The federal government keeps wasting money, as well as the states and localities, on systems that don't work as well as Oregon's vote-by-mail," Wyden said.

But mail-in balloting has critics nationally who say it robs from the election-day experience and could allow fraud, so there's no guarantee that it ever will fully replace the voting booth.

"Vote-by-mail is a bad idea," said Curtis Gans, director of American University's Center for the Study of the American Electorate. "It doesn't help turnout. It can lead to fraud."

Nonsense, said Oregon Secretary of State Bill Bradbury, the state's top elections official.

"With vote-by-mail, every signature is checked against a voter's original voter registration form prior to their vote being counted," Bradbury said. "That process makes vote-by-mail the most fraud-free election system available today."

Gans also worries that with people voting at different times, they won't have access to the same information.

"Suppose the Friday before the election of 2004, (Osama) bin Laden had been captured or there was a terrorist attack or the stock market collapsed," Gans said. "Nationally, there would have been 20 million irrevocable ballots that had been cast where people didn't have that information."

If states switch to voting by mail, it's important they provide detailed information in voters' guides along with the ballot, said Robert Richie, executive director of the Center for Voting and Democracy.

"If you did vote-by-mail without a voter guide, you're missing out on some very important information," Richie said.

Wyden said that if voters are concerned about voting too early, they have the option of waiting until the last minute and dropping the ballot off in person.

"For the voter who wants to wait, either for that or for anything else, they can wait almost until the last minute," Wyden said. " Oregon makes a provision for the late-deciding voter."

Bradbury praised Wyden for introducing a bill that would have no impact on his constituents, since Oregon already votes by mail.

"What he's trying to do is provide greater visibility to this voting system as a solution to a lot of problems and provide some federal assistance to help people start experimenting with it," Bradbury said.

Wyden has attracted two big-name Democratic co-sponsors, Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Barack Obama, D-Ill. Wyden predicts states will be receptive to mail elections.

"I'd love to have officials from other parts of the country come to Oregon and see our story of success," Wyden said.

Richie said he agrees that the federal government should help states improve their voting systems, but the grants shouldn't necessarily be restricted to voting by mail.

"I would prefer not just an assumption that vote-by-mail could work everywhere," Richie said. "Let's look at what's working and not working and not assume what each state and county will do."

Until then, states are quickly adopting what is known as "no-excuse absentee voting." That allows voters to cast absentee ballots without being required to provide a reason. Smith's Vote by Mail Project said 23 states offer the option.

For the past five years, California has offered permanent no-excuse absentee voting. And this year, the key state of Ohio began offering it.

About half of Arizona's cities use vote-by-mail. In some of the Arizona cities, more than half of the voters choose mail-in ballots over traditional voting. This year's ballot initiative for statewide mail elections makes Arizona the most prominent battleground for vote-by-mail this year.

Many of the objections being raised nationally were issues in Oregon when voting by mail first started, but gradually objections died down.

Bradbury warns that the transition to statewide vote-by-mail systems is slow. Voters must get comfortable with testing the system in local elections first.

"It's real clear to me," Bradbury said, "that if you try to implement vote-by-mail before people have had a chance to really get their hands on it and get a local sense of it, people are resistant."

Jeff Kosseff: 503-294-7605; jeff.kosseff@newhouse.com

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