Rolling Back Early Voting

From KTVB:

BOISE – About a third of the 653,000 Idaho voters this year cast absentee ballots, a phenomenon that powered record turnout but raised concern among some Republican lawmakers that mass voting before Election Day is disruptive and disadvantages some candidates.

Although Oregon has adopted vote-by-mail and only two Washington state counties still open polling places, some in Idaho’s GOP majority worry about their state following a similar path.

They want the 2009 Legislature to take up the issue, though just what form any bill might take is unclear.

Rep. Raul Labrador says, “For the convenience of county workers, we’re expanding it further and further, and I’m not sure it should be that way.”

I’m against making “Vote by Mail” as an official default  practice because it risks fraud. I’ve also heard a lot of complaints about early voting. My dad was railing against it on the phone when I called him from Elko on Monday. I understand the argument against it. It ultimately cuts the window for campaigns and also makes it possible for a candidate to be elected should a last minute story break. And it makes campaigns more expensive. You’ve got to start making closing argument ads three weeks before the election. It makes campaigns far more costly. You have to have a bigger sustained effort with more political mail and Get Out the Vote expenses. 

In addition, there’s the fraud factor. Bryan Fischer at the Idaho Values Alliance reported on numerous eyewitness accounts of funny business surrounding this practice:

I heard from more than one voter, including a candidate, that poll workers in Ada County did nothing to prevent voters who had received absentee ballots from voting twice, once by absentee ballot and once in person. Because these voters are all honorable, they did not take advantage of this glaring oversight, and in fact brought it to the attention of oblivious poll workers.

There were some hinky numbers in the early voting results in Boise’s District 16, as all three Republican candidates – Christ Troupis, Elizabeth Allan Hodge, and Joan Cloonan – had eerily similar vote totals before yesterday’s live voting was counted, despite having significantly different political profiles. All three had absentee totals within 19 votes of each other, which naturally makes one pause and wonder how coincidental those results could be.

That said, the last time I went to my polling place on election day was 2004. Lines are long. In 2006, my boss had to leave her polling place in Meridian when she went to vote after work. Hers was one of the polling places where people were waiting in line until 11 pm to vote. This year she voted early with only a brief wait.

The fact of the matter is that with a growing population, we can’t have people in line for hours, this is Idaho, not some third world backwater. The options we face to address issues with the lines on election day are tough. Opening more polling places is expensive.

On the other hand, you can’t allow fraud or ruin campaigns in the name of convenience. With that in mind, here’s my simple proposal for alleviating this situation:

1. Require Photo ID at the polls either on election day or for early voting, while working out a system to purge dead voters from the polls. This is a “Duh” measure and it needs to be done. Protect the sanctity of the ballot.
2. Issue every voter a PIN for requesting absentee ballots. Give them a start-up PIN and then a phone number they can change it at.
3. When an Absentee ballot is issued to a citizen, there should be appropriate measures to ensure there’s no voting twice. I wish we could be on the honor system, but it’s not that type of country any more.
4. Raise the Individual Contribution limit. If we’re going to have a voting system that costs more, we ought to make it easier to raise funds. As it is, Idaho has a limit of $1,000 per person that prior to 2004 mirrored the federal campaign limit. The federal government left the figure unadjusted for inflation until 1994 and doubled it and then began to index. Idaho still keeps at $1000. I say raise the contribution limit to match the federal limit.

I think any reform should focus on making our existing process better, because early voting isn’t going away.