It's on the march: Vote-By-Mail, one county, one state at a time

[ginnyinWI]

This month's "The American Prospect" features a delightful set of articles on the idea of voting by mail. Oregon has it; Washington state soon will have it too, and California is not far behind. Many other states have absentee voting available for anyone who wants it, no reason needed.

This is exciting! It makes fraud and voter suppression much, much more difficult, if it's possible at all. No system is perfect, but this is much better than DRE's or conventional voting at polls, and costs less.

Those are the two top reasons that this idea is catching fire and is going to be irresistable:
1) The public is more and more suspicious of our current voting methods, and tests have shown that their suspicions are well-founded.
2) HAVA has added requirements and extra costs to local election boards who are looking for a cheaper way to do it.

I really do think that this is going to spread, in a grassroots way, across the nation from west to east. Our brief, calamitous experiment with DRE's will pass into history. Read this and the other articles online or in the magazine and see if you don't agree.

http://www.prospect.org/web/page.ww?section=root&name=ViewPrint&articleId=11419

[patrice]

1. Oregon

Sends out Great voters' guides. My daughter lives in Portland and looks forward to voting because of the wonderful guides they receive in the mail, as big as a small book, and everyone gets plenty of time to study up before they mark their ballots and send them in.

That's beautiful.

I'm jealous.

[eridani]

2. There still needs to be topnotch oversight

One advantage of precinct opscan voting is that you can fill out another ballot if the scanner rejects yours. With central tabulation, the election workers have to fill out a duplicate ballot.

[BeFree]

3. Just might be the answer

Is there a company that specializes in setting up the system, or do BOE's have to wing it?

I like to get my county to use this system. Mine, and your's.

Of course, the ballots are counted by a machine. As long as that machine had open code on it vote stealing would be easy to spot.

[mmarcus]

4. Excuse me?

Don't take away my polling place!

Really. Why am I supposed to lose my chance to vote at the polls just because some crappy equipment was bought here?

Get rid of the damn Diebold don't get rid of my polling place.