Idaho has nothing to fear from voting by mail
Idaho should move to all-mail voting for the November election. That means mailing a ballot to every registered voter in Idaho.
But to do so, state officials need to act quickly to give county clerks ample time to prepare.
Voting by mail is the right thing to do for a number of reasons, the most obvious being public health concerns during the ongoing coronavirus pandemic. Vote-by-mail is also convenient and will be cost-effective, and likely will lead to higher voter turnout.
Idaho has been using absentee ballots since absentee voting was added to state law in 1970. Idaho proved that it can pull off an all-mail vote, as it did in the May primary, albeit with some glitches. Voting by mail in November would be easier than it was in the May primary because there are not partisan ballots in the general election.
Finally, our multiple layers of security checks provide a high degree of protection against voter fraud.
Vote-by-mail should be extended beyond the COVID-19 crisis and become the norm in Idaho. But most immediately, Idaho should switch to vote-by-mail for November, out of health and safety concerns.
“People in Oregon absolutely love vote-by-mail,” former Oregon Secretary of State Bill Bradbury told me in a phone interview last week. “We don’t understand why others don’t do this. We’ve been doing this a long time, and it’s great. … To me, vote-by-mail just guarantees that everybody can participate, without having to not go to work (that day) or whatever, or maybe Election Day’s a bad day for whatever reason. That’s just not relevant anymore.”
Voting by mail is not new or untested. Oregon has been voting exclusively by mail for 20 years, with great success and bipartisan support. Five states conduct all elections entirely by mail: Colorado, Hawaii, Oregon, Washington and Utah, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. At least 21 other states have laws that allow certain smaller elections, such as school board contests, to be conducted by mail.
Increased voter turnout
In Oregon, prior to 2000, the state allowed vote-by-mail in certain elections. In 1998, Oregon voters approved, by a more than two-to-one margin, an initiative to make all elections vote-by-mail.
In the state’s first vote-by-mail presidential election, in 2000, voter turnout was 79%. By the 2004 presidential election, turnout hit 86%. By comparison, Idaho’s turnout was 71% in 2000 and 77% in 2004. Primary turnout in Oregon similarly has been higher than in Idaho.
One study of the 2016 general election in Utah found that vote-by-mail increased turnout by 5-7 percentage points, with low-propensity voters, including young voters, showing the greatest increase.
Adam Bonica, an assistant professor at Stanford University, spoke with the National Press Foundation in June about his study of Colorado’s all-mail voting system, which showed increased turnout across demographic and socioeconomic groups.
“What we see across the board is that groups that had been traditionally lower-propensity voters tended to see the largest increases in terms of overall turnout,” Bonica said. “So this includes people of color, people with less than a high school diploma or less than a graduate degree. And then, importantly, we saw pretty large differences with respect to wealth and income, where least wealthy households were the ones that saw the largest increase.”
Bonica and his colleagues reported these results in May in a guest opinion titled, “We should never have to vote in person again,” in The New York Times.
In Idaho, despite some challenges during the May primary, voter turnout for the primary election increased dramatically. In the last presidential-year primary, in May 2016, turnout was 23%, with a total of 176,806 votes cast. In the 2020 all-mail primary, 334,713 people voted, for a 38.1% turnout. (Oregon’s turnout was 47% in the May primary.)
Turnout promises to be high for November as well. Already, Ada County has received more than 100,000 requests for an absentee ballot.
Cost savings
Another reason to do all-mail voting, particularly during the economic turmoil caused by the pandemic, is cost.
Ada County Clerk Phil McGrane told me in a phone interview that it cost Ada County about $400,000 to run the all-absentee election in the May primary, which is about typical for a primary. The additional costs of mailing and printing extra ballots was offset by the cost savings from not running polling places and hiring poll workers, McGrane said.
If the county runs a combination of in-person and absentee voting, it will cost more.
“One of the challenges for November is that we’ll be doing both,” McGrane said. “And now we’ll have the high costs running polling locations, and the high costs of mail.”
Eliminating the cost of polling places would take care of that.
A 2016 study of Colorado’s elections from the Pew Charitable Trusts found that costs decreased an average of 40 percent in five election administration categories across 46 counties because of mail-in voting.
Fraud protection
One concern among opponents of vote-by-mail is fraud.
Chad Houck, Idaho chief deputy Secretary of State, does not advocate for or against all-mail voting. But he expressed concern about mailing ballots to all 900,000 registered voters in Idaho.
“It does put out all these extra ballots, and people are worried about election integrity and potential for voter fraud,” Houck said in a phone interview. “It just does not make sense to have even 400,000 — if we had 60% turnout, you’d still have 300,000, 400,000 ballots floating around out in inventory that someone could potentially try to vote.”
However, Idaho maintains a rigorous system of protecting ballots, voter lists and the integrity of ballots that are mailed in.
When a ballot is prepared to be sent to a voter, it is put in an envelope, which contains a secrecy sleeve, the ballot itself, the instructions for processing everything, and an outer return envelope.
“And the outer envelope is key,” Houck said. “Because on the outer envelope, there are specific identifiers that tie that outer envelope literally to you. That way when it comes back ‘voted,’ the ballot itself doesn’t matter.”
That’s because voters must sign their return envelope, and election officials check that signature to make sure it not only matches the signature on file, but also matches the voter information that’s associated with the envelope itself, Houck said.
Someone wouldn’t be able to make copies of that envelope to send in phony ballots.
Houck even cited an example of a husband and wife, sitting at the kitchen table together, accidentally swapping return envelopes. Elections officials would see that the identifiers on the envelope don’t match the signature.
That signature check also is important to catching someone trying to vote intentionally in someone else’s name, McGrane said.
“If I call you and say, ‘Hey, Scott, we got your ballot and this definitely isn’t your signature, did you vote?’” McGrane said. “And you’re like, ‘No, I haven’t returned my ballot,’ that’s all we need to start reaching out to law enforcement to begin pursuing, is there a problem here, are there nefarious activities going on here?”
It also could be something as innocuous as a person’s signature has changed over time.
Once the ballot is received, and the information and signature are verified, that voter’s name gets checked off in the centralized voter list, and another vote cannot be registered in that person’s name.
After the ballot is removed from the envelope, it’s placed in a pile to be opened from the secrecy sleeve.
“Then an entire grouping of them are pulled from the sleeve and unfolded and laid out so they can get put through the tabulator,” Houck said. “At that point, every ounce of that is very controlled inventory. And it’s always done with multiple people in plain sight, often behind glass walls.”
As for the list, itself, Houck said Idaho’s voter registration system is highly secure, and the state is able to detect if someone has gained access to the system, whether data was changed and is able to isolate those changes and restore data to its original state.
“Idaho voters should be tremendously secure that the absentee processes that we’re utilizing and the election processes as a whole — because of the clerks that, at the county level, orchestrate the actual election itself — that our elections are run with the highest of integrity,” Houck said.
Further, the motivation for voter fraud is dubious, said Bradbury, the former Oregon secretary of state.
“There are a couple of cases in every election where county clerks around the state catch things that are not right, invalid or get tossed out because of that,” Bradbury said, noting that regularly catching innocent mistakes is a good indicator that the system is working. “But it’s really not very widespread, and frankly, you know, people who are criminals basically are interested in money. They’re not interested in elections. I’m sorry, that’s just the truth. And a criminal is not going to waste potentially getting caught on something like an election.”
Ballot harvesting
Related to voter fraud is concern over a practice known as ballot harvesting, in which someone collects other people’s ballots and turns them in for them.
For the most part, it’s innocuous: You collect ballots for your immediate family or you offer to help out your neighbor and drop theirs off in the mail for them.
Because the envelopes are tied to individual voters, and the signatures on those envelopes are checked, there’s little opportunity to submit a fraudulent ballot.
However, as happened in North Carolina in 2018, a Republican operative ran an extensive ballot-collecting operation and was accused of tampering with ballots and simply destroying other ballots that favored the Democratic candidate. The operative has been charged with multiple felonies.
The fix is as simple as a state law, such as other states have enacted, that makes it illegal to collect more than a certain number of ballots for others, essentially a ban on the practice of ballot harvesting altogether.
Vote centers
One feature of voting in Idaho that would need to be addressed is same-day registration, which Idaho allows and is a wonderful feature to our system. But it poses a challenge when voting all by mail.
One model to consider would be Colorado’s, which mails a ballot to every registered voter but also establishes “vote centers,” where people may cast a ballot during an early-voting period or even on Election Day.
This would add to the cost but would be less expensive than running hundreds of individual polling places throughout the state.
Vote centers also would help mitigate the potential disenfranchisement of some voters who either do not have a street address, share a post office box or otherwise have difficulty accessing mail.
Ada County has proved to be highly successful in maintaining early voting locations as well as a mobile voting unit, which could be continued to help relieve Election Day congestion at any vote centers.
Partisan advantage?
Another frequent concern raised about mail voting is the belief that vote-by-mail somehow favors Democrats.
“We’ve looked at whether the increase in turnout in Colorado among Democrats versus Republicans was substantially different, and we didn’t find that,” Bonica said. “We found that it increased turnout among both Democrats and Republicans by similar amounts. Where we saw really large increases was independent voters, and that’s largely because younger voters are much more likely to register as independents.”
Bonica reported that Democrats and Republicans benefited about the same amount — a boost of around 8 percentage points, while independent voters saw a boost of 12 percentage points.
Bonica said that in reality, the current system of in-person voting favors Republicans.
“There’s a lot of evidence that the playing field has been tilted in favor of Republican constituencies for quite some time,” Bonica said. “And vote-by-mail isn’t making it expressively easier for Democrats to turn out, it’s just making it easier for everyone to turn out. It’s leveling the playing field.”
To show that it’s not a partisan issue, Oregon’s current Secretary of State Bev Clarno, who is a Republican, swears by vote-by-mail.
“Oregon has proven that vote by mail works and that it is safe, secure, and more cost effective, all with a high turnout,” Clarno wrote in a recent opinion piece. “Oregonians love our vote by mail system, and we will continue to protect the safety, security and fairness of every election and every vote.”
Problems with polling locations
McGrane said that most people show up to the polls after 5 p.m. on Election Day. For those who have voted before, you know they can often be small, cramped spaces that offer little to no opportunity for social distancing. With dozens or even hundreds of people showing up in a three-hour window on Election Day, the possibility of long lines, long wait times and possible spread of coronavirus is very real.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends well-ventilated spaces that circulate outside air. Anyone who’s spent 10 minutes in a polling place knows that doesn’t usually happen.
The CDC also recommends cleaning and disinfecting equipment, surfaces and shared objects, such as pens; putting up physical barriers, such as plexiglass; and maintaining social distance in lines and among voting booths.
Further, many polling locations are at schools. With schools (at least in theory at this point) in session on Nov. 3, the concern of spreading COVID-19 is even greater.
With that concern, McGrane said many polling locations are not going to be available for use, whether a business has declined or a school or church is too concerned about contamination. Finding suitable locations for precinct-level polling places is going to be a big challenge.
Even if locations can be lined up, there’s the matter of finding poll workers, many of whom tend to be older and are more susceptible to the ravages of the virus.
McGrane said that some clerks have actually expressed a moral conundrum in even asking people to risk their lives to work at the polls. Many regular poll workers simply will not step up this year.
Beyond that, and perhaps even more problematic, is that some poll workers might sign up for Election Day duty but then change their mind at the last minute, putting officials and voters in a bind. Another concern would be poll workers becoming ill right before Election Day.
It’s clear that running in-person polling places is fraught with hazards.
National polls
Voting by mail is becoming more popular.
A poll by the Pew Research Center in April showed that the percentage of those who favor conducting all elections by mail has increased 18 percentage points since 2018, with more than half (52%) wanting elections to be conducted that way.
Overall, 70% of those polled favor allowing any voter to vote by mail if they want to, including 44% who strongly support this policy.
In a separate poll by Fox News in May, 63% said they support allowing all U.S. citizens to vote by mail in the upcoming presidential election because of coronavirus concerns, with 30% opposed.
Switching to mail voting in Idaho
One option to switch to all-mail voting would be to call a special session of the Legislature and pass some legislation that would accommodate it.
McGrane and Houck have testified before the State Affairs Working Group, which is looking at election issues, among a host of other things.
McGrane, who testified as chairman of the elections committee of the Idaho Association of County Recorders and Clerks, brought forth several proposed pieces of legislation to consider if legislators were called into a special session over the election. He was met with deep skepticism, to say the least.
The State Affairs Working Group is scheduled to meet again at 9 a.m. Aug. 10.
It’s unclear whether legislators would have the political will or interest in switching to mail-in voting.
Alternatively, the state of Idaho is still in a state of emergency because of the coronavirus pandemic. Gov. Brad Little declared the state of emergency in the early stages of the pandemic and has renewed the declaration in 30-day increments since. That declaration allowed him to mandate all-mail voting statewide for the May primary. With new cases, hospitalizations and deaths continuing to mount in Idaho, it would be reasonable for Little to continue extending that state of emergency.
With that declaration, the governor could then make some of those changes to the November election.
Given the concerns over public safety and costs, that would be the best course of action.
Gov. Little should require a ballot to be mailed out to every registered voter in Idaho and enact a provision that allows every county in Idaho to establish vote centers on Election Day, forgoing traditional precinct-level polling places.
Once Idaho sees how convenient vote-by-mail is, how safely it can be done, how cost-effective it is and how much it increases voter turnout, I suspect we’ll never turn back.
“It’s really a system that enables full participation, and it can be done in a fraud-free manner,” said Bradbury, the former Oregon secretary of state. “We have lots of proof of that. So I’m a huge supporter.”
