Vote by Mail
Your weekly excerpt from one of my books. This week: "The Hidden History of the War on Voting"
Vote by Mail
Voting by mail offers a tidy solution for voters who are unable—because of either physical or time constraints—to vote in person at a polling place. Voting by mail has also been thoroughly tested at the state and local levels across the United States, and 22 states have provisions for certain elections to be held entirely by mail-in ballots.
The way it works is simple, as the National Conference of State Legislatures (NCSL) explains: “All registered voters receive a ballot in the mail. The voter marks the ballot, puts it in a secrecy envelope or sleeve and then into a separate mailing envelope, signs an affidavit on the exterior of the mailing envelope, and returns the package via mail or by dropping it off.”19
In many ways, vote by mail reflects the United States’ original election system up until 1844, when voters cast ballots over the period of a month.
Oregon, Colorado, and Washington distribute all their ballots by mail, but it is not the exclusive way that ballots are cast—and many people still want the sensation of actually delivering their ballot to a physical location, rather than having a stranger pick it up from their mailbox.
Researchers at the MIT Election Data + Science Lab found that “73 percent of voters in Colorado, 59 percent in Oregon and 65 percent in Washington returned their ballots to some physical location such as a drop box or local election office. Even among those who returned their ballots by mail in these states, 47 percent dropped off their ballot at a U.S. Post Office or neighborhood mailbox rather than having their own postal worker pick it up at home.”20
This is critical, because the goal in our democracy ought to be to provide as many opportunities as possible for people to vote.
Vote by mail is very well tested, with proven results in terms of boosting voter turnout in both rural and urban areas, particularly in off-cycle elections.
A rural Nebraska county of about 2,000 people recently experimented with conducting its entire May 15 primary by mail. Every voter in Garden County, Nebraska, was mailed a ballot, and they had to return it by mail or to a drop box by the end of May 15. Remarkably, Garden County saw a 58.7 percent voter turnout in the 2018 primary—more than double the Nebraska-wide average of 24.3 percent.21
In April 2018, Anchorage, Alaska held its first vote-by-mail election for a local election, and it received about 80,000 votes out of 218,000 registered voters—up from the record 71,000 votes that had been cast in 2012.22
In addition to increasing voter turnout and making it easier to vote, vote by mail nullifies the need for absentee voting, as every voter is given the opportunity to vote absentee, by mail. But vote by mail also has its shortcomings. As the NCSL notes:
“Mail delivery is not uniform across the nation. Native Americans on reservations may in particular have difficulty with all-mail elections. Many do not have street addresses, and their P.O. boxes may be shared. Literacy can be an issue for some voters, as well. Election materials are often written at a college level.”23
Lawmakers can solve some of this by pushing to have the state governments pay for postage, as Governor Kate Brown is currently promoting in Oregon. In Washington and California, prepaid mail ballots are already the norm.
Vote by mail, if implemented correctly, could go a long way toward boosting voter turnout in federal elections.
However, there’s plenty more we can do to ensure that every eligible citizen has the right and ability to vote, such as providing staffed vote centers, now used in Denver and the entire state of California, offering help to voters with disabilities, language translations, and other assistance.
The savings of replacing local polling places with vote by mail can be put toward vote centers that provide early voting and well-trained staff to assist voters who need it.
This is assuming the US Postal Service isn't abolished and taken over by a private company owned by Republicans.
AS to the questions of mail-in ballots being discarded and not counted: I have been an election clerk in numerous elections at multiple levels (state and national), over many years, and I can speak to the fact that 1) any mail-in ballot received by the Town Office is checked against the voter list (using the signature on the outside of the envelope), then locked in a secure safe until election day; 2) mail-in votes are then taken out of the safe and added to the votes cast by in person voters; 3) counted by the election clerks in a prescribed way that means each vote is noted by both a Republican clerk and a Democrat clerk, and their totals must agree.