Mail-only voting resembles one big scheme

On Tuesday the polling place will make its final appearance in a Washington state election.

I’ll be there to commemorate the loss. But others, led by Secretary of State Sam Reed and county auditors throughout the state, will be celebrating their final triumph over the voting booth. By next fall, the entire state likely will vote by marking a paper ballot, stuffing it in an envelope and dropping it in the mail.

As of now, Pierce County is the only county that hasn’t decided to shift to mail-only voting by 2008. That will change if County Auditor Pat Mc- Carthy has her way.

It took them a decade to do it, but state and county elections officials have made Washington an all-mail state through a combination of great patience, the perpetuation of myths and a fair amount of sleight of hand.

This result, to hear the hype, is progress. People are busy and they want to vote at the kitchen table when it’s convenient. Yet it was never enough to allow anyone who wanted to vote by mail to do so. Everyone had to vote that way.

The feeling wasn’t mutual. Voters who wanted to keep voting the way George Washington did never insisted that everyone vote in person. We went along with the advancement of laws that made it easier for those who wanted to vote by mail to do so.

Don’t worry, we were told. There always will be poll voting.

“I do think that many people want the ceremony, the interaction, the flags, the election board workers, and such, in order to feel like they are truly participating in our American political system,” Reed wrote the year before he ran for secretary of state. “We need to continue to provide that ‘election day fix’ for those people.”

And when she was running for county auditor, McCarthy wrote, “Voters should have the option to vote either at the polls or by mail.”

That was then, Reed now says. That was before voters made the decision to use vote-by-mail in such numbers that it’s now silly to maintain polling places for the benighted few.

In a taxpayer-funded “report” last week, Reed’s office termed vote-by-mail “a movement that was not led by the state or county government, but by the people at large.”

But the “special report documenting the overwhelming popularity of voting by mail” is more of a propaganda sheet (actually 16 sheets) that makes assertions with only the slimmest documentation.

Because, in fact, promoting vote-by-mail has been the policy of Reed and most county auditors for a decade or more. Most auditors promoted and encouraged mail voting as aggressively as they derided and discouraged poll voting, then pointed with wonder at its “overwhelming popularity.”

In Pierce County, thousands were forced to vote by mail when their polling places were closed or moved so far away as to be inconvenient.

Then, as the number of poll voters dwindled, the same elections officials asserted that it was a misuse of tax dollars to keep polls open for the few.

Reed even spun the vote-counting errors that plagued the 2004 governor’s election as evidence that polls must be closed. Even though all of the problems in 2004 involved how the counties – King particularly – mishandled absentee ballots, Reed concluded that fault lied with “the inefficiency and high risk of error caused by administering two elections simultaneously.” And he asserted – again without evidence – that “elections are more accurate when they are conducted by mail.”

Polling places are all but dead after Tuesday, with only a slim chance that the Pierce County Council will resist McCarthy’s claim that instant-runoff voting makes it impractical to use both polls and mail.

Reed has led the charge to kill the voting booth and won. Congratulations. But why does he have to expend public resources to produce propaganda to tell us how popular his actions are?

Peter Callaghan: 253-597-8657

peter.callaghan@thenewstribune.com

blogs.thenewstribune.com/politics