Our View: Washington’s mail-in voting should mean fewer hassles

While some lament the loss of civic camaraderie associated with voting in person on Election Day, Washington state voters are going to be especially grateful for mail-in balloting this year. That’s because long lines await voters elsewhere.

A long litany of factors has animated the public this election season. The prospect of the first African-American president or the first female vice president. The likelihood of a close presidential race. Turmoil in the financial markets. An economy heading for recession. An unpopular war, president and Congress. Young people getting more involved.

The national party conventions drew inordinate interest. The presidential debates set ratings records.

An avalanche of voter registrations has triggered predictions of historic turnouts. Already, voters across the nation are facing the kind of lines we’d associate with the day-after-Thanksgiving sales. Some early voters are waiting up to three hours to cast ballots as election officials struggle to handle the unprecedented volume.

Voter registrations in Washington state have topped 3.6 million. That’s a record, even though about 483,000 names have been stricken from the rolls since legislation was adopted in 2006 to create a voter database. An estimated 77 percent of eligible Washingtonians have registered, according to the calculations of Professor Michael McDonald at George Mason University. The secretary of state’s office is predicting a turnout of 83 percent, which would be the highest in a presidential year since 1944.

But the lines will be minimal, because the vast majority of voters mail in their ballots.

In Idaho, about 75 percent of the eligible population is registered to vote and turnout is expected to hit 80 percent.

But the real eye-popping number comes out of Michigan, where an incredible 98 percent of the voting-age population has registered. While activists and election officials can be proud of their registration efforts, the high number is also attributable to the lagging prospects for workers. Michigan leads the nation in the loss of manufacturing jobs, with the auto industry in steep decline. Voters are looking to politicians for hope.

The real challenge for election officials will be to competently secure all of those ballots, weed out the fraudulent and defective ones and accurately tabulate the results. If the presidential election is as close as 2000 and 2004, the results will surely be challenged.

Though the country is suffering through hard times, the election season has stoked a once-in-a-lifetime level of interest. Here’s hoping we’ll be celebrating such impressive participation, rather than fighting over the results.