Spin Control: Forcing Washington to change voting system could be difficult

The announced plan by Attorney General Pam Bondi to end mail-in voting in Washington and three other states would seem to have – at best – an uphill struggle.

First, Washington’s Legislature, after a somewhat long and drawn-out process, switched the state to mail-in voting in 2011, and it would be up to Congress to find a reason to change it. The U.S. Constitution specifically gives state legislatures the power to set up the “Times, Places and Manner” of elections for Congress, and any alterations would have to be done by Congress as well.

This same section of the Constitution is what may allow the effort in Texas to redraw Congressional maps to increase the number of Republican seats and California to follow suit if its voters approve that tit-for-tat plan. One can hardly attack mail-in voting on constitutional grounds if one is defending gerrymandering on the same two sentences in Article I.

Opponents might be able to convince Congress to ban mail-in voting if they had evidence of a good reason, such as it’s inaccurate. But there’s no hard evidence for that, and some empirical evidence that it’s at least as accurate as making people line up at a poll site and drop their ballot into a metal box with a flimsy lock on it – which is the system Washington had before mail-in voting.

In recent years, Washington has had several test cases that back up the accuracy of the current system.

In the 2018 primary, several Republican candidates for Congressional offices who didn’t make the cut thought they smelled something fishy. They initially wanted a hand recount of the entire U.S. Senate race. When faced with the down payment for the bill they’d face if results didn’t change, however, they opted instead to start small. They asked for a hand recount of 25 precincts in four Western Washington counties, with the prospect of asking for more recounting if any discrepancies showed up.

None did.

In the 2022 general election for Spokane County auditor, Republican challenger Bob McCaslin, who finished behind Democratic incumbent Vicky Dalton, also was skeptical of the results. He asked for a hand recount of five precincts, with a total of 2,347 ballots. None of the results changed.

But, election skeptics are no doubt thinking, those were just a few precincts, and a bigger sampling would turn up better evidence.

So take the 2022 race in southwest Washington’s 3rd Congressional District. Democrat Marie Gluesenkamp Perez finished the final count with 160,314 votes to Republican Joe Kent’s 157,685. A recount was held, and the new tally was 160,323 to 157,690.

Want a bigger sample? Use last year’s primary for Washington lands commissioner. In that top-two election, there was a question of who finished second. Republican Sue Kuehl Pederson was slightly ahead on Election Night, but Democrat Dave Upthegrove closed the gap and went ahead by 51 votes in the final count. That was close enough for a mandatory hand recount, and this time the state had to pay for it. All 39 counties recounted ballots, under the watchful eyes of partisan representatives.

When that process was finished, Upthegrove’s total went up four votes, to 396,304. Pederson’s total went up six votes, to 396,254. That’s a variation of about .000757% for the total ballots counted for the two candidates.

Yes, there are slight discrepancies in these races. But they usually result from a few ballots that aren’t marked properly by the voter – using a pencil instead of a pen, using a checkmark instead of filling in the oval – that are caught by a human and awarded to that candidate based on clear voter preference. That’s why in races so close that a few votes can matter, the state requires a hand recount.

Careful readers might note that some of the above examples involved Republicans who asked for recounts that didn’t change the result. It might be ungenerous to point this out, but in politics, like in sports, the teams that lose are more likely to seek rule changes to “level the playing field,” while those that win are “fine with the way things are.”

A recent Elway Research Poll of the state’s registered voters for Cascade PBS shows a significant partisan divide over feelings on whether the state’s mail-in voting system is secure and accurate. A majority of voters polled said they are confident, and that support held up when the results were broken down by age, education or income level. But when it came to partisan splits, the results were skewed. Some 85% of the self-identified Democrats said they are confident, while 73% of Republicans said they are not. Independents are in the middle, with 56% expressing confidence and 43% a lack thereof.

It’s not a universal tendency, and some of the biggest defenders of Washington’s vote-by-mail system are the former Republican secretaries of state who helped run elections for decades. One of the four states likely to be targeted in an effort to ban mail-in voting is Utah, which often vies with Idaho for being the most Republican.

But it is also minority-Republican lawmakers who are likely to introduce bills to change the state’s voting system by doing away with statewide mail-in voting and return to in-person voting. It’s also majority-Democratic lawmakers who control the committees and consign those bills to limbo.

Washington’s previous method of voting, which relied on punched computer cards in Spokane and many other counties, was also prone to slight errors. That was because punching a tiny perforated chunk out of the card – known as a “chad” – for each candidate or issue on the ballot was an imperfect system. Sometimes the chads didn’t come all the way out of the card, so when the computer scanned it, that choice wasn’t recorded. Recounts then involved the challenge of interpreting a ballot with a chad that was partially perforated but not wholly removed.

So-called “hanging chads” were a factor in deciding the 2000 Florida presidential winner and putting George W. Bush in the White House. Anyone who remembers those fun post-election weeks of a quarter-century ago might agree it was a system at least as fraught as Washington’s current one.

Requiring all voters to show up at a precinct polling station to cast ballots and put them in a box isn’t really a solution if those ballots are then counted by a computer, as happens in most states without mail-in voting. Suspicion of counting machines among election skeptics is at least as ingrained as suspicion of mail-in balloting.

To do away with scanning machines would require hand counts of every race on every ballot. Not only would that introduce a greater possibility of human error, it would mean we’d get the final results of a November general election sometime around the next Presidents Day.