Everyone Wants to be Like Oregon
Brian Wagner
The blog Lean Left airs an idea to avoid excessive problems with voter fraud--imitate Oregon. With frustration high over polling problems, look for more pundits and activists to take a closer look at the simplicity that is Oregon's vote-by-mail system.
http://www.leanleft.com/archives/003838.html
Of course, some people seem to be looking for the worst, like "domineering heads of household" dictating how the family votes. Maybe it is just me, but i thought that was more of a problem faced by the Pashtuns in Afghanistan, not Bob and Sally on Main Street. The complete opposing statement:
This is a terrible idea.
In the first place, the potential for fraud exists at several different levels. It is almost impossible to be certain that the person who fills out an absentee ballot is the one that it was issued to. In the absence of a specific suspicion of fraud, the only identity check for an absentee ballot is a signature. The odds that more than a tiny fraction will be examined with enough care to detect forgeries are slim, particularly if the entire election is run this way.
The opportunities for ballots to be "misplaced" in such an election are also at least as great as with traditional voting. Ballots can be lost, stolen or misdelivered before they reach the voters, after the voters have filled them out or even after they have been delivered to the elections board. In the last case, procedures can be put in place to document the number of unopened ballots arriving and being processed at each step in the tabulation, but these procedures are no more and no less reliable than those that exist for counting ballots filled out at a polling place.
Most importantly, vote-by-mail eliminates the concept of the privacy of the voting booth. There would be no way to bar domineering heads of household from dictating the votes of their spouses and children, whereas currently each individual has the opportunity to vote however they wish with no possible repercussions for that vote. More extreme abuses such as employers, churches or other institutions insisting that people vote a particular way could be legislated against, but would be much more difficult to police than with traditional voting methods.
Certainly, the inadequate procedures and resources that created delays, confusion and an inability to determine after the fact whether fraud occured are a scandal and one that needs to be corrected as soon as possible. But vote-by-mail is not the solution.
Should Oregonians try to export vote-by-mail? Are we happy with the system and the abolition of polling booths and 2-hour lines?
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connect with blueoregon
Nov 10, '04
vote by mail is sweet -- if i had to go stand in line for 2 hours, i wouldn't bother voting. our democracy isn't so important that i have to waste my life standing in line for it...i get enough of that at the Post Office and the DMV.
2:09 p.m.
Nov 10, '04
We love vote by mail. Good day for it too, both the Statesman Journal and the Oregonian agree.
I'm getting myself confused with the official/unofficial roles here, but I'll do it anyway.
We don't have a fraud problem, and checking signatures is an excellent way to prevent a fraud problem, particularly when signature checkers are trained by forensics experts.
There's only one state in the nation that check a voter's signature against a signature in a poll book - that state is New York. Anywhere else, I could show up, say "Hi, my name is Brian Wagner," vote and leave. When the real Brian Wagner shows up two hours later, he's out of luck.
It's convenient. This is obvious, and more so when the alternative is spending four hours in line in the rain.
Some people, and I used to be one of them, complain about the loss of community and sense of an official moment for voting. But we have two weeks of nonstop civic engagement reminders, in our neighborhoods and on the phone and on the doorstep, and an opportunity to gather with friends and family to discuss ballot issues on our own time.
Coercion of abusive spouses is a legitimate concern, but not one that affects a majority of voters (and frankly, voting coercion is the least of an abuse victim's worries). And I doubt that a business would seriously fire an employee for not revealing their ballot choices. Maybe such domineering, authoritarian, and patriarchal tendencies rule in other states - but we just haven't had a problem with that in Oregon.
Vote-by-mail is a low-cost, low-tech solution that provides an automatic paper trail of votes, reliable safeguards against fraud, and the convenience that voters need to make informed decisions fit into busy schedules. It works here, and there's no reason why it can't work in other states too.
Nov 10, '04
Here's what I posted there:
Look, the election system in the US is not that messed up. Sure, you can point to some irregularities in 2004, but what do you expect in a decentralized, federal system of government with 50 states, 3000+ counties, and 250,000,000 citizens?
The facts are, as noted by www.vote.caltech.edu and verifiedvoter.org, that while there are problems that need to be rectified (most importantly, a paper trail for all electronic voting machines), this year's election was overall fair, free, and well-administered.
I can tell you a lot about vote by mail if you like, it has both advantages and disadvantages, but adopt it for the right reasons.
5:43 p.m.
Nov 10, '04
Vote-by-mail is by no means a panacea. There are other necessary things that go with it, and while Oregon has enough of them to conduct a fair election here, some states (Ohio, New Mexico and Florida come immediately to mind) just do not meet those requisites.
See, it's not 50 states, 250000000 people, 8000 counties, and hundreds of elections in the hands of one man or even one staff (and even if it was, we're the most technologically-advanced country, even if not the most intelligent, in the world, but I digress).
Instead, it's one state, with howmanyever counties and people, and each state has a cadre of government officials whose sworn duty it is to conduct fair elections. Within that, each county uses the state-mandated vote-by-mail system to avoid problems such as, "how many machines do we put in Sellwood precincts?", and "how far must demonstrators stand away from the polling places?".
That's why Oregon even has its own election model, complete with vote-by-mail, whether or not other states wish to emulate it.
If it were a national election, like Prof is fond of arguing, based on the current composition of government, we'd ALL vote on paperless Diebold machines, susceptible to hacks, unauditable, from sea to shining sea, and maybe there wouldn't be enough machines in, say, SE Portland, or Enterprise, or Medford, depending on who was in power.
That this thread even exists with any basis in fact is proof of the diligence and dedication to fairness it takes to do any one state's part in the national election.
6:02 p.m.
Nov 10, '04
We had the highest voter turnout in the nation for a reason - because people get more time to vote. Period. I'm not going to say I'm not impressed with all of the folks who waited hour upon hour to exercise their right to vote, because I am. I'd do it too if I had to, but I don't. I had a couple weeks to vote. I marked my ballot as I made my decisions and I was able to take it to an official drop site on a Sunday! Being an Oregonian rocks.
Oh and here's my I (heart) vote-by-mail schpeel from a couple weeks ago.
Nov 10, '04
Well I grew up and went to school in Oregon but left before this vote by mail thing started. I like the idea but it isn't necessarily the only way to make voting easy.
I lived in Alaska for 10 years where the entire state uses optical scan ballots that are quick and easy to use. They are scanned right at the voting place and you know if your vote was counted or not because the machine will reject it if it can't read it. During the 2 weeks leading up to the election they have early voting locations all over the state and in places like airports where you can drop in and vote. Last time I voted in Alaska I voted in the Anchorage airport while waiting for a flight to Seattle even though my home and precinct were 800 miles away in Juneau.
Now I live in Texas where the same optical scan ballot system and early voting. Same as in Alaska I dropped into one of the local polling places 2 weeks for the election and voted quick and easy.
What absolutely horrifies me is to see the extremely long lines at the polls in other parts of the country. I haven't seen any comprehensive writeup of why there were such long lines in different areas, but I suspect it is because they are not using voting systems that are scalable. When you use electronic voting systems, or even punch card ballots, you have a limited number of booths at each precinct and everyone just has to wait until the next voter is done until a machine is freed up. No way to speed up the process, especially if the ballot is long with lots of complicated measures. That's the beauty of optical scan ballots as well as vote by mail of course. With optical scan ballots you can have as many people voting in a precinct as can cram in and find places to fill out the ballot on chairs, floors, the back of a book, whatever. You don't need to vote in the booth, you can just take your ballot and pen and go fill it out anywhere. For me that is one of the best arguments against electronic voting machines. They are expensive and it seems that lots of precincts just don't have enough of them to avoid lines.
Anyway, the vote by mail system really sounds good too. The arguments about fraud are frankly pretty lame in my opinion because every single state has vote by mail for absentee ballots anyway. So the abusive husband could just as easily pull the same thing here in Texas just by applying for mail-in absentee ballots for him and his wife.
Nov 11, '04
At first I wasn't at all fond of mail voting. I missed the trip to the polling station. It was magic, in its own way.
Now that I see what sort of sleight-of-hand gets pulled at polling stations, I realize how vulnerable they actually are. All of a sudden I'm quite enamored of mail-voting; after all, if you don't trust any of the other routes of entry, you can take your very own ballot down to the place where it's going to be counted, under your own sight, nobody gets a chance to fiddle with it, and you give it right to the nice, harrassed-by-self-interested-observer elections department worker who takes it right where it's supposed to go.
God knows it's not perfect, but it's better than what they have in Ohio and Florida.
Sam Klein.
Nov 12, '04
Re: Kent's argument that optical scan ballots would eliminate the long lines...
It's a nice thought, but all those voters still have to wait for a poll worker (who are getting hard to recruit in our Bowling Alone society) to find their names on a bulky paper list, collect a signature, look at ID in some places, and then go through whatever foofaraw is necessary if a provisional ballot has to be issued.
And people waited for hours at early-voting places, too, in several states.
Re: that objection from the leanleft blog...
<h2>Your voting history is public record. You can check whether a ballot was tabulated in your name for each time you sent a ballot in. Unfortunately, it's danged hard to get hold of those records -- or is it? Does anybody know a source I haven't heard of?</h2>