Switch to mail ballots possible

Voting at the neighborhood polling site in Spokane County could go the way of the straw boater hat and the torchlight candidate rally as early as next year.

County Auditor Vicky Dalton, Spokane’s chief elections official, said she will recommend later this month that the county convert to mail ballots for all voters in 2006 rather than spend more than $500,000 for handicapped-accessible voting devices.

“We have to face the realities of federal laws, state laws and financial pressure,” said Dalton, who has scheduled a public meeting at 7 p.m. Tuesday in the county commissioners’ hearing room, 1026 W. Broadway, to discuss the options for future elections.

Under a 2002 federal law known as the Help America Vote Act, the county will be required next year to provide voting machines that can be used by handicapped voters at each of its 85 poll sites, she said. Those machines would cost between $500,000 and $750,000 to purchase, have ongoing maintenance costs and require an extra poll worker at each site.

Instead, Dalton is proposing Spokane County switch all of its voters to mail-in ballots. It could operate two or three “voter service centers” each Election Day at various places around the county, where voters could drop off their ballots in locked boxes without using postage.

They could also go to the voter service center for replacements for lost ballots and provisional ballots, or to use a handicapped-accessible device. Under this plan, the county would buy about 10 of the special voting machines and take them to different locations, such as senior centers, nursing homes and group homes, in the weeks before the election.

The county might also have several ballot drop-off points, with locked ballot boxes, for about three weeks prior to the election. Dalton said she’d have to work out some details to ensure the security of those sites.

The number of permanent absentee voters has steadily increased, and the number of poll sites declined, in recent years. In 2000, the county had 190 polling sites, and about 17 percent of its voters cast ballots by mail. Now there are 85 polling sites, and 57 percent of voters are registered as permanent absentees or live in all-mail precincts.

About three-fourths of all the ballots cast in an average election come in the mail, Dalton added. The exception is the presidential election, where poll site turnout increases.

It’s also getting harder to find a place that meets all federal regulations for handicapped access that will let voters cast their ballots, she said.

“The schools are full, they don’t have room for us,” she said.

While an increasing number of voters are signing up for mail-in ballots, the system is not without its critics. When the Legislature was looking at election reforms this year in the wake of the razor-thin 2004 governor’s election, the Evergreen Freedom Foundation urged the state to scale back the number of absentee voters.

Jonathan Bechtle, a legal analyst for the foundation, said the group is concerned with the lack of security for absentee ballots. Ballots can be stolen from a voter’s mailbox, he said. Ill or incompetent people can be more easily coerced if they vote by mail.

Going to all-mail voting could increase problems with felons voting who haven’t had their rights restored and with people filling out ballots of voters who have died but haven’t been removed from the rolls, Bechtle said.

“Obviously, a lot of people prefer vote-by-mail,” he said. But counties should avoid going to strictly mail voting until some of the problems with registration are addressed.

Poll site voting may be more expensive, he conceded. “If it’s security versus money, security should be the priority.”

Dalton said that by next year, Washington will have a statewide database that can link voter registration to other lists from the Department of Licensing, the State Patrol and the health districts, making it easier to cull felons and deceased voters from the lists. The county will have to be increasingly vigilant on things like coercion of voters and stolen ballots, she added.

Bechtle said another downside of all-mail voting is the loss of the community activity an election once provided, by bringing everyone to the neighborhood polling site. Mail ballots, he said, “reduce the status of voting to the latest market survey arriving in the mail.”

The voting service centers will provide voters with some of the feel of the neighborhood polling place, Dalton said. If the commissioners agree to make Spokane an all-mail county, the Elections Office will find a way to note the change and bid “a grand farewell” to a precinct voting station.

“We would be recognizing that poll sites have been a major civic statement for all these years,” she said.