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This is Election Day. Well, not exactly. Since
mail-order ballots are in wide use throughout Colorado for
non-partisan off-year elections, today is more like Last
Day of Election Season.
That's one of the reasons I don't like this vote by
mail
system. Political campaigns and related journalism
may be annoying or worse, but they are designed to inform
and persuade the public.
That takes time. Early ballots, cast back when Daylight Savings Time was still effect, reduce the amount of time for us to become familiar with the arguments, issues and candidates. Further, important information can emerge late in the campaign -- information that might have changed your mind, except your ballot is already cast.
So this method does not produce voters who are more informed.
One argument in favor of mail-order elections is that they increase turn-out because it's more convenient. After all, in a regular election, you've got to find your polling place and get there in time, then stand in line and fill out your ballot, and you might do that in a hurry and make a mistake because you feel edgy on account of all those impatient people standing in line behind you.
But most of that doesn't hold up. It's not at all difficult to pick up a sample ballot, contemplate it at your leisure, mark it appropriately, then take it with you to the voting booth to use as a guide on the real ballot, which you can then mark in a minute or two.
As for the difficulty of getting to the polling place, I'm fortunate. Our precinct votes in the St. Joseph Center, which is across the street from where I live and work. On a real Election Day, I just glance out the window until there aren't many parked cars, which means there shouldn't be much of a wait. Then I stroll over, gossip a little with the neighbors who are election judges, wait for at most a couple of minutes, and vote.
To be sure, voting is not that convenient for most people. But there's an aspect of civic ritual in actually going to a public polling place and casting a ballot, a feeling that I'm part of something big and important. I don't get that feeling when I'm sitting at the kitchen table marking a mail-order ballot. That feels more like filling out a warranty registration card.
Many have bemoaned the loss of civic culture
in
America, and mail-order balloting certainly won't reverse
this course. Or will it? After all, there is the argument
that voter turn-out has quadrupled in off-year elections in
the past decade, thanks to the mail-in ballots.
But is increased turn-out necessarily a benefit? It sounds good, until you think of this way:
There are large numbers of people who are too hurried or too lazy to spend half an hour for voting at a regular polling place, but they will vote if you give them a couple of weeks and don't require them to go any farther than the mailbox. Do you want these folks making important decisions about water policy, property taxes, gambling venues and the like?
That such people have been making decisions may explain
some of our state government's financial complications as
Amendment 23 interacts with the Gallagher Amendment which
interacts with TABOR to create a fiscal train wreck
that might take a constitutional convention to straighten
out. This shouldn't be a surprise; after all, we've made it
quite easy for the slothful and uninformed to make public
policy.
Then there's the problem of security with mail-order
ballots. Stuff gets swiped from mailboxes, which is one way
that identity theft
happens. But ballots could be
taken, too, and filled out and returned.
Of course, the voter's signature on the exterior of the envelope (you did remember to sign that, didn't you?) is supposed to provide some guarantee of authenticity. But do you really think that our county clerks have the time and expertise to check these envelope signatures against the registration cards on file?
That's just a start on those possibilities. But let's move on and consider another argument: that mail-order elections are cheaper to conduct.
They probably are, since there's no need to hire election judges or rent polling places.
But that shouldn't be a major consideration. After all, it would be even cheaper just to hire a polling firm to survey a representative sample of likely voters, and use those results to determine the outcome.
And we could save even more money by dispensing with even that sop to public opinion, and then installing a monarchy. Democracy has some costs, and we should be willing to pay them -- even if it means standing in line once or twice a year.
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