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The Economist: Postal balloting: Stamp of approval?
Submitted by Anonymous on Sun, 03/26/2006 - 12:13am.
Western states are closing down their polling stations. Should they? The Economist / March 16, 2006 / Go to original
EVEN in a time of tight races and election snafus, the Washington state governor's race two years ago stood out. Two months after the polls closed, a winner was declared—despite dead people having voted and, in parts of the state, more ballots being returned than there were recorded voters. “Some people say ‘count every vote'; it'd be better if you just counted every legal vote,†says Dino Rossi, a Republican who lost by a wispy 129-vote margin.
Yet Washington is forging ahead with the very election method that helped to muddle that crazy race: postal balloting. In 2004, nearly 70% of the state's voters filled in their forms at home, rather than going to a polling station. Now King County, home to Seattle, looks set to go to a mail-only system in 2007, doing away with polling stations altogether. The idea is that one system will be simpler. Ron Sims, the county executive, explains that this will be cheaper in the long term. And he thinks voters prefer it.
Polling stations are going out of fashion in plenty of western states. There are three basic forms of postal voting. The most common is absentee voting. If a voter will be out of town on election day, he can request a postal ballot. All states allow this, and nationwide about 13% of all ballots counted are absentee.
But some states, including California, go a step further by allowing voters to register as permanent absentees—so that at every election they will automatically receive a ballot in the mail, regardless of whether they are at away or at home. In the 2004 general election a third of the votes in California were absentee and 18% were permanent ones. In last year's special election, 40% of ballots cast were absentee ones with the figure being over half in many Bay Area counties.
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VIDEO: “Protecting Your Vote”
This article doesn't accurately report the FACTS
First, Dino Rossi and the Republicans claimed they had evidence that thousands of illegal votes had been cast, such as by nonregistered voters. In the end, the court found only a handful (3, I think) of the "suspicious" ballots were fraudulent -- a "minor" FACT that Rossi and the MSM fails to acknowledge.
Also, in the 2004 election, Snohomish and Yakima Counties were the only 2 counties in WA that used touch-screen voting machines. According to a study done by Paul Lehto and Ron Baiman (see http://tinyurl.com/ahkt9):
"• Sequoia touch screens are required to have their power cords daisy chained, forming a de facto network that third parties can use to tap into the machines or have the machines communicate among each other.
• Snohomish county had the highest election day increase in vote for Republican governor candidate Dino Rossi relative to absentee voters, while other nearby counties had either smaller increases or election day actually favored the Democrat Christine Gregoire.
-snip-
• The chances that 2/3 of the vote would show a Democratic lead of 97044 to 95228 votes, while the remaining 1/3 of the vote on touch screens would show a Republican lead of almost 5% (50,400 Republican to 42,145 Democratic) as a result of voters randomly choosing whether to vote by paper ballot or by touch screen is one in 1,000 trillion! A true impossibility."
So, the issue is NOT polling place vs. mail-in ballots, but rather paper ballots vs. e-voting machines and tabulators that use secret software.
Pro-Vote by Mail
Thanks for your clarification on the opening statement of the article on Vote by Mail published in The Economist. I just want to point out that the overall article is not focused on the 2004 Governor's race in Washington. I believe this article is well-researched and actually closes on a favorable note in support of Vote-by-mail.