The Ballot's In The Mail?
The media was atwitter over the weekend
with possible solutions to the Florida/Michigan primary problem. Can the Democratic
Party disenfranchise all those voters merely to prove a point? Did the states
miscalculate so wildy that there's a real chance they won't be able to seat any
delegates in one of the most important conventions in years? And who is going
to pay for another round of elections? As someone who works on voting rights,
it's hard to argue that those Florida and Michigan voters (who had
nothing to do with scheduling their rogue primaries) should be shut out of the
process. But the kid in me, reared on playgrounds and games like handball and
freeze tag, knows you can't change the rules in the middle of the game.
One solution bandied about by the Florida
Democratic Party, according to the Los Angeles Times, is a vote-by-mail
election, which would cost significantly less than another traditional primary.
"Under this scenario," the article says, "ballots would be mailed out to all of
Florida's
approximately 4.7 million registered Democrats in May or June," costing between
$4-$6 million (much less than the estimated $25 million for another traditional
primary).
But trying to implement a vote-by-mail
scheme so quickly is not the solution to get the Florida Democratic Party out
of this mess. Vote-by-mail might seem easier, and it certainly is cheaper, but sending
ballots out to 4.7 million voters is complicated and subject to errors that
could easily compound Florida's
primary woes.
Consider California, where officials were still processing
and counting vote-by-mail ballots weeks after its primary. According to the New
York Times, about 4.1 million Californians voted by mail. The practice
can be easier for voters, but it is labor-intensive for registrars and staff,
who must open all the mail, authenticate it, and sort it by precinct. In California, voting
officials literally ironed thousands of ballots that had been crumpled or
creased in the mail, in order to feed them into the vote-counting machines (the
appropriate setting to iron out a ballot, just so you know, is apparently
"silk.") This is part of the reason why,
two weeks after Super Tuesday, California
still had some 800,000 ballots to count.
And that's only considering the
vote-by-mail ballots that actually reach
eligible voters. In California
on Super Tuesday, the Election Protection Hotline reported numerous calls from confused voters who had requested vote-by-mail ballots
but had never received them. Project
Vote reminds us that vote-by-mail can only be as dependable as the mail
service itself, which is inconsistent in low-income and densely populated urban
areas, areas with non-traditional addresses, and when people move. So for people who live in housing
developments or remote urban areas, and who get there mail less reliably than
others, this is not a great solution.
Linking your ability to vote with the post
office's ability to reach you is a dangerous proposition. Voter
caging, the practice of sending out mass mailings and using the returned
mail to challenge voters' registrations, is notoriously inaccurate, which is
why there are currently bills pending in Congress to ban the practice. Voter
registration lists can be rife with simple errors in addresses that can make
mail undeliverable, and mail
often goes undelivered even when the voter at the address may be registered
and perfectly eligible.
While vote-by-mail shows promise as a means
of conducting elections in the future, it can't be implemented as quickly as
many election officials want it to be. As voting technology expert Larry Norden
explained in testimony in Ohio (which has been considering a vote-by-mail plan
for the November elections), delivering high-volume mailings in a secure,
accessible way is no easy feat, and it should not be adopted without good
planning and public education, especially right before a critical election (and
certainly not for a slap-dash do-over election like we may have in Florida.)
The cost of a vote-by-mail election is even
more attractive to the Florida Democratic Party, since it is getting no love, or
money, from DNC chair Howard Dean or Governor Charlie Crist. But the truth
is there will be no easy, or cheap, solution here. Unfortunately it will be
voters who will in some way pay for the party's mistake.
