Voting by mail offers the only realistic solution for standardizing the way we hold elections in Washington. Lawmakers in Olympia, however, don’t appear ready to join Oregon in mandating all-mail elections. So they should approve a reasonable alternative: Give counties the option of making the switch.
Most voters already have embraced the convenience of voting by mail – 65 percent of them do so in Snohomish County. As that number grows, the cost of maintaining separate polling places becomes harder to justify.
But current law only allows counties with no precincts of more than 200 people to conduct all-mail elections. Snohomish County doesn’t qualify. Senate Bill 5744, co-sponsored by four Snohomish County senators, would lift that restriction, giving the County Council a choice. The county’s elections chief, Auditor Bob Terwilliger, testified in favor of the bill this week.
Its advantages are many. It would save money by eliminating the need to train and pay polling-place workers. Terwilliger estimates that cost at $80,000-$90,000 per countywide election. The county could also avoid the cost of refitting its electronic voting machines with paper printouts – a policy to be implemented next year. That could save as much as $1 million.
Counties such as Island, which must under federal law switch from punch-card voting to a different system, would be given an easy, inexpensive option.
Further, an all-mail system would bring the entire election process into the auditor’s office rather than scattering it among individual polling places. That means voter-eligibility issues would be handled by full-time election workers. And it begins to address the clamor for standardizing the way ballots are handled throughout the state, a byproduct of the disputed governor’s race.
Many voters, of course, still cherish the act of going to a physical polling place to cast their ballot. Some, admirably, turn it into a civics lesson by bringing their kids along.
But consider this: Voting by mail allows you to take your time. Your ballot arrives in the mail at least a couple of weeks before election day, giving you multiple chances to gather the family around the kitchen table, ballots and voter’s pamphlet in hand, to discuss issues and candidates.
Other election reforms, such as holding primaries earlier than September and requiring mail ballots to be received by election day, should be enacted this year. But improving our election system is an ongoing job, one that can’t be completed in one legislative session.
Giving each county the choice of all-mail elections, this year, would be a good step forward.
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