This year is no different, with newspaper editorials
and op-eds
calling for Washington to adopt the practice of Oregon -- the only other state
with all-mail voting -- where ballots must be delivered to elections
officials by election day to be counted.
The impetus for the
demands is the delay of days or weeks in determining the outcome in close
contests, due to processing of late-arriving ballots. That leaves candidates and
politics junkies – categories which probably comprise most readers of The
Advance – frustrated.
So, critics say,
why not speed things up by adopting the Oregon-like election-day deadline?
Washington Secretary of State Sam Reed has joined the makes-perfect-sense
chorus, pushing bills in the
Legislature to effect the change.
Except that the case
Reed and others make might not be quite so clear-cut. So argues David
“Goldy” Goldstein of The Stranger
in Seattle, who says that changing the deadline would do little to reduce the
delays.
The
problem, Goldstein says, is not that ballots arrive late – even in Washington,
the overwhelming majority are delivered by the day after the election – but that
elections officials can’t keep up with processing the ballots as they come
in.
For Goldstein, the
minimal reward from adopting the Oregon approach is outweighed by the risk: that
some voters will be disenfranchised if their ballots are delayed in the mail
through no fault of their own, or if they aren’t roused to vote by anything
other than the excitement of election day itself. Besides, he says, most
“ordinary” voters aren’t bothered by what we’ve got now.
To read this story in Spanish, click here.
To read this story in Spanish, click here.
