Procrastinator’s dream, auditor’s nightmare

State and local elections officers are working mightily to head off a bill that would allow folks to register to vote and cast a ballot right up to Election Day.

The proposal would cost money, create logistical nightmares, tax the computerized database, open the door to voter fraud and raise bad cholesterol levels by 10 percent, they said.

OK, the last one’s not true. But they really, really hate this bill, which seems to have crept up on them while passing the Senate on a party-line vote and getting out of its jurisdictional committee in the House.

Such vehemence may surprise folks over in Idaho, who can do exactly what this bill suggests Washington do: Let people show up at a polling station on Election Day with proof of residency, register and vote in that very election. On the Washington side of the border, wannabe voters who are so lackadaisical about their citizenship that they haven’t registered two weeks before the election are in the same position as a Chicago Cubs fan at the end of baseball season: Wait till next year.

Spokane County Auditor Vicky Dalton points out, however, that Idaho still votes at the polls, and Washington votes mainly by mail, so the systems are set up differently. A registration at a county in Washington must be cross-checked through the state’s system, which compares addresses, driver’s license numbers and other bits of information to prove that the person is who he or she says.

Of course, a person standing there with a state-issued ID that has a picture that looks like him, and a signature that looks like the one that he just scrawled on a piece of paper might be a pretty good cross-check, too. But the point is that all this checking to make sure that felons or dead people or foreigners aren’t making mischief in our elections takes time, which is pretty much of the essence around Election Day.

Elections officials would have “too many people coming in” to register, Dalton said – which is something she doesn’t usually complain about. Based on studies of other states that have same-day registration, Spokane County could see 40,000 people trying to register on Election Day in a presidential year.

“I’m looking at having to rent the Coliseum,” Dalton complained, ignoring for the moment that the Coliseum is, well, gone. But you get the picture – she’d need some place with lots of parking, and space for 40,000 people to stand in line while they wait to sign paperwork and be given provisional ballots.

Katie Blinn, the state assistant director of elections, said procrastinators will always wait until the deadline, whenever it is. But having them show up two weeks ahead of time means there’s that much more time to process them through the system before their ballots show up. If the system hiccups, or worse, there’s time to fix it. Processing them on Election Day offers no room for backup.

So, the state computer system would have to be upgraded to handle as many as 400,000 registrations at one time. That’s a major part of the $4.8 million that the bill is estimated to cost the state over the next two years. Cost to the counties, for staff to process the registrations and the provisional ballots these folks would have to cast, would be extra, Blinn said.

This is not the first time the state has considered same-day registration, Blinn said. But it is the first time a bill has gotten through one house of the Legislature. The last time the idea was floated, she said, one legislator recalled how followers of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh took advantage of same-day registration to take over the town of Antelope, Ore.

That was pretty much the end of that bill.

In other ballot news …

The Legislature did try something that could mollify the state’s orneriest voters last week. It decided to meet them halfway over their reluctance to bow to the tyranny forced upon them by the U.S. Supreme Court and the major political parties over the partisan primaries.

That’s not to say we’re going back to the blanket primary and can pick a Democrat for one office, a Republican for another, a Libertarian for a third. Those days are likely as extinct as the dodo bird. Some day you’ll tell your grandchildren about voting that way, and they’ll think you made it up.

But a bill awaiting Gov. Chris Gregoire’s signature says you won’t have to check a box that declares “I am a Republican” or “I am a Democrat” before your vote can be counted. A line to that effect appears above a party’s candidates on ballots that have both the Ds and the Rs on a single sheet.

Counties that use a primary ballot where all the candidates are on the same sheet – Spokane doesn’t, but most counties do – will be able to count the votes if only Republicans or only Democrats are marked.

Some estimates suggest as many as 100,000 ballots weren’t counted in the 2006 primary because voters didn’t mark the party box.

Just a thought

If the Legislature really wanted to help voters still steamed at the loss of the blanket primary – and based on calls, letters and e-mails, there are plenty out there – it could have gone a step further: All ballots could have carried a box that says “I refuse to tell the state my party preference because it’s nobody’s dang business.”

Now that would get a lot of boxes filled in.