Voters offer fixes for election system

Washington could fix its election system by severely cutting back on the number of people who vote by mail, some Eastern Washington residents told a special task force Tuesday night.

No, it could fix the system by having nearly everyone vote by mail, others said.

It could fix the system by having its primaries earlier than mid-September, to allow more time for a general election ballot to be prepared and mailed out, some said.

But it could fix it even better by doing away with primaries, others argued, and setting up a system called Instant Runoff Voting, in which people rank their preferences for candidates, and votes are retallied until one candidate has a true majority.

It would be a good idea to require all absentee ballots to be in the county elections office by Election Day, suggested some people.

Except of course for the absentee ballots from military personnel, who may need extra time to get their ballots back from a war zone, said others.

Welcome to the world of the Elections Reform Task Force, a panel set up in the wake of the closest gubernatorial race in U.S. history.

The mechanics of the elections process are usually a topic that excites only civics instructors and good-government advocates. This year, it’s a hot enough topic to draw more than 100 people to a Spokane Community College auditorium, where they heard about a package of changes being proposed by Secretary of State Sam Reed and offered up ideas of their own.

Reed believes all counties should certify their results on the same day. Now they all start counting on the same day, but small counties finish in a matter of hours or days, while King County, the state’s most populous, can take two weeks. Last year, when King County elections officials had a series of problems losing and then finding ballots, voters in other parts of the state began to question their controls.

“The King County Elections Department must be a very exciting place. They kept finding new voters every day,” joked Alexandra Ockey at one point during the hearing. “I think we can truly call them miracle workers.”

Reed also wants to move the primary to the third Tuesday in August, adding a month between the primary and the general.

Bad idea, said Bruce Vails: “Who’s going to vote during summer vacation? Use your thinking caps.”

But that was about the strongest rebuke for Reed. He has been criticized by some of his fellow Republicans for the way he handled the gubernatorial revotes. A couple of King County Republicans even tried to have him recalled, but a judge threw out their case. But Tuesday, Democrats and Republicans alike praised him as a man of courage who stood up for his principles during a post-election process that stretched until Christmas.

Several voters said there are too many questions about who is on the voter rolls because of the reports of ballots cast by felons, dead people or noncitizens. The state should wipe the rolls clean and make everyone sign up again, they said.

“There should be an immediate statewide re-registration of all citizens, in person, with proof that they are U.S. citizens,” Joanne McCann, of Spokane, said.

But Reed said federal law doesn’t allow a wholesale cleansing of the voter rolls. Names can only be taken off for voters who die, move or become ineligible because of problems such as felony convictions, he said.

There should at least be a better process for checking the voter registration forms, said Ron Baker, a Grant County Republican official who registered voters last summer. “I took people’s word that they were who they said they were,” he said, and later found out that elections officials didn’t check names if people signed the oath at the bottom of the form saying the information was true.

Morton Alexander and several other members of the Green Party said the state should revise the whole system with Instant Runoff Voting. That would allow a voter to indicate a second or third or fourth choice as well as a first choice for an office. If no candidate gets a majority when all the first choices are tallied, the candidate with the lowest votes is dropped from the list, and the second choice of his or her voters are added to those candidates. Eventually, one candidate has the support of a majority of the voters.

In the 2004 governor’s race, the 63,000 votes to Libertarian Ruth Bennett could have been divided among Christine Gregoire and Dino Rossi, and one of them would have likely emerged with a greater margin of victory than Gregoire’s 129-vote lead.

While the crowd was divided on how to fix the system, it had little doubt the system needed fixing. When Former Washington State University President Sam Smith, a task force member, asked who had lost trust in the elections process, nearly every hand went up. He got a similar response after asking if the state should move the primary back an unspecified amount of time and if the state should pay for a voters’ pamphlet in the primary. Almost everyone thought there should be some type of paper ballot, and hardly anyone said they would trust a system in which voters touch a computer screen to record a vote without receiving a ballot that could be double-checked.

The task force will issue a report later this year. In the meantime, it continues to take comments and ask voters to fill out a questionnaire on its Web site: