Posted: Saturday, June 28, 2008 12:00 am
Add another drawback of mail voting to the big one. I didn't hear about it until a few weeks after the primary last month, so here it is now.
The big drawback of voting entirely through the mail, as we do in Oregon, is that there is no ceremony, nothing to teach children the importance of taking part in a democratic election. The monthly magazine of AARP took note of the importance of this American ritual, especially for children, in its current issue. In Oregon, though, in this regard at least, the next generation will have to look after itself.
But we already know about that, and Oregon voters have said they don't care. So what if kids grow up thinking that from outward appearances at least, voting is about the same as sorting through the rest of the junk mail?
The other, newly discovered defect is that your vote may just be discarded if you're not careful about maintaining the same signature throughout your voting life.
The case I hard about goes like this:
A young Benton County voter casts his ballot on the Friday before the Tuesday voting deadline, in plenty of time. Like a lot of people of his generation, he has only a cell phone and his old number is disconnected.
His signature on the ballot-return envelope is a scrawl, and there's no way to match it to the scrawl that was his signature when he registered some years ago.
The election office sets his ballot aside, can't reach him by phone to ask him to come in. Sends him a letter instead.
The election comes and goes. The Democratic presidential contest is decided. Our voter finally gets his letter. He had 10 days to prove that the ballot was his and have it counted. But what's the point after the result is announced and it's not even close? So he ignores the letter and his ballot goes uncounted.
An isolated case? Not necessarily. In the primary in Benton County, 74 ballots were challenged for signatures not matching the ones on file. Elections Supervisor Jill Van Buren says usually about one-third are eventually accepted after the people come in. That means the others are out of luck. If they were legitimate voters, and not spouses illegally signing their partners' ballots, they voted in vain.
The problem is small now. But it may grow. Turns out that a new law says election clerks must use only the most recent voter registration card to compare signatures. Before, they could use whatever older cards they had on hand and sometimes those would provide a closer match. That stratagem is no longer legal to use.
When we voted at the polls - we might go so far as to call those days the golden days of yesteryear - we stuck our ballots through a slot in the ballot box ourselves and could be reasonably sure that they would be counted that night. No hanging around was required, no waiting for a letter or a call to see whether anybody could read or match our signatures.
Now we sign, put the ballot in the mail and hope for the best.
As our former slogan said, this is Oregon, and things are different here. They sure are.
The D-H editor can be reached at hhering@dhonline.com.