The debate around voting by mail continues to swirl in social media and in the press. In fact, the very term, “vote-by-mail,” has become such a hot button for some factions, that some supporters of the concept are rebranding it “vote from home.”
Potato, potahto, tomato, tomahto – whatever you want to call it, the reality is that more than half of the states in this country already are conducting at least some of their elections by mail, and five states have made the switch to all-mail elections and aren’t looking back.
Approval of a citizen’s initiative in 1998 led to Oregon being the first state in the country to conduct elections exclusively by mail. Washington followed suit in 2005, and Colorado, Utah, Hawaii have embraced all-mail elections since then.
The advantages of mail-in voting typically include more convenience for the vote (No long lines! No rushing to the polling place after work!), and financial savings for the state. Because even when states like Washington elect to pay the return postage for voters (that way they can avoid the complaint that voters having to pay for a return stamp amounts to a poll tax), that cost is significantly less than having to train and pay for all of those temporary workers to sit at hundreds of polling places on election day.
And as the National Conference of State Legislatures points out, while “all-mail” elections means that every registered voter receives a ballot by mail, it doesn’t necessarily follow that voters have to return their ballots by mail.
In Washington State, for example, voters can return their ballot by mail or go to one of hundreds of secured election drop boxes up to 8 PM on Election Day. During an election, ballots are collected from each drop box regularly by two elections staff members who use a chain of custody process to transport and verify all ballots.
In addition, Washington State voters also can choose to hand-deliver their ballots to county elections offices or other designated vote centers in the days leading up to and including election day.
While Washington State looks like a blue state during presidential election years, it’s actually more complicated than that. The state’s two rugged mountain ranges, the Cascades and the Olympics, provide some generalized geographical definition between liberal and conservative voters. The farmers and nuclear engineers east of the Cascades tend to vote for conservatives, as do the timber communities clustered around the Olympic Peninsula. On the other hand, folks sandwiched between the two ranges in the Puget Sound lowlands of western Washington are more likely to fit the liberal profile typically assigned to the Left Coast.
Kim Wyman, a Republican, has served as Washington’s Secretary of State since 2013, and before that as a county elections director for nearly a decade. She has presided over scores of elections. And she knows vote-by-mail shouldn’t be a red-blue issue. A strong advocate for her own state’s vote-by-mail process, she has stepped up her efforts to reassure voters and elections colleagues elsewhere in the country that mail-in elections are secure and trustworthy.
In a recent piece in USA Today, Wyman wrote, “Voter confidence is not a pillar of our democracy, it is the pillar.”
That is why she has been taking a proactive role in educating other elections officials around the country about common-sense practices they can adopt to expand their absentee or mail-in voting procedures in a secure manner.
Washington’s Secretary of State Kim Wyman oversees that state’s vote-by-mail elections. – photo courtesy of Kim Wyman
Some vote-by-mail voters in Washington like using the dropbox option to return their ballots. – photo credit King County Elections