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11 February 2011

Some thoughts on the demise of the vote-by-mail bill

I oppose early voting and voting by mail. I was therefore pleased when Montana’s house of representatives rejected HB-130 on the third reading. But I was not pleased that so many Republicans voting “Nay” justified their decision to kill the bill as a vote against election fraud. Nor was I overjoyed when some Democrats began questioning whether the overnight switch of 15 GOP votes was engineered by Denny Rehberg.

Before I address fraud and the alleged Rehberg connection, a brief explanation of why HB-130 was a bad bill that deserved killing.

The bill proponents — among them the state’s county clerk and recorders; Rep. Pat Ingraham (R-Thompson Falls); Secretary of State Linda McCulloch, a Democrat; the people who approved the 2010 platform of Montana’s Republican Party; and various editorial writers — presented vote-by-mail as a money saving measure that would make voting more convenient, and increase turnout. The latter two arguments were dubious at best:

More convenient? Voting is already pretty convenient in Montana. Voters can sign-up for a permanent absentee ballot and vote in person or by mail up to a month in advance of election day. How much more convenience would mandatory vote-by-mail bring? How much more convenience is needed? What difference would it make, and how is that known?

Increase turnout? Not in the general election. After adopting vote-by-mail in 2000, Oregon’s voting eligible population turnout increased slightly in presidential years, and decreased slightly in non-presidential years. The differences were so small that factors other than vote-by-mail could well have accounted for the difference. And in Montana in 2010, the year with the most absentee voters yet, the voting eligible population turnout was the lowest in at least 30 years.

The school board exemption. There is only one kind of election in which mail balloting increases turnout: school board, municipal, and isolated elections, in which voting in person elections typically result in frightening low turnouts (sometimes below 20 percent of registered voters). But HB-130 exempted school board elections because the education lobby demanded it (I strongly suspect that the teachers unions prefer low turnout elections). So HB-130 could not have been intended to increase turnout: it mandated vote-by-mail in the elections in which mail balloting does not increase turnout, and exempted elections in which vote-by-mail does increase turnout.

What, then, was the real motivation behind HB-130? Money, mostly. According to the fiscal note (PDF), closing all but a handful of polls would reduce governmental expenditures by at least a million dollars a year. The reductions would be accomplished by eliminating hundreds, possibly thousands, of election judges and poll workers. HB-130 was a jobs killing bill — a jobs killing bill opposed by Republicans and supported by Democrats. If that fact doesn’t boggle your mind, it should.

Some of HB-130’s supporters contend that the pool of poll workers is vanishing, that hiring and training poll workers is becoming too hard. Here’s one election judge’s reaction to that:

James, your observations about the negative aspects of mail-in ballots has changed my thinking considerably. I agree that “kitchen-table coercion” could be a real problem in some households.

I’m an election judge, and I see it is a complicated and expensive process to get all of us trained, the equipment transported, the ballots and all that paraphernalia carefully sorted and sealed, etc. I think now that it is the cost of an open and observable election process. How do poll watchers monitor mail-in voting?

Also, judges are in short supply and we are aging. However, the only way I became a judge was through the invitation of another judge. At least one young FVCC student is currently a judge, which gives me hope. But even if it’s primarily we retired folk who serve, there are plenty of us to fill the need—if we are made aware of the opportunity.


Fraud and intimidation

Rep. Derek Skees voted against HB-130. Writing in the Whitefish Pilot, he said “I discovered that although Montana’s county clerks and recorders have many problems with the system as it is, this solution does not solve the problem and further complicates it with the potential for increased fraud.” In my opinion, he voted the right way, but for the wrong reason.

HB-130 wasn’t a bill that created vast opportunities for fraud by voters. The system for collecting and verifying mail ballots seems reasonably sound, and the overwhelming majority of voters are honest and would not take advantage of any opportunity to cast a vote illegally. Significant fraud in vote-by-mail elections generally occurs in two situations: (a) third party collection of completed ballots, a practice not prohibited by HB-130, and (b) crooked election officials stealing or altering ballots, a practice not unknown in Florida.

Intimidation of voters is another matter. Casting a secret ballot in the privacy of a booth at a public polling place prevents a spouse, a family member, a political party operative, or a neighborhood tough, from influencing a voter’s choice. That protection disappears when a voter sits down at the kitchen table to mark a ballot. HB-130 tried to address that by mandating that a warning against intimidation or undue influence (vote buying, sometimes) be printed on the mail ballot package, but that’s a CYA provision that would be no more effective than a restraining order against a psychotic ex-boyfriend who lives next door.

♦ ♦ ♦ ♦ ♦

Skees, incidentally, is catching hell on Cowgirl’s blog for his comments on race in his oped in the Pilot. He said:

In light of my exposure, I must contend that when a few people in certain minorities view the world with the filter of race, difference and haves versus have-nots permeating their every perception, they see it in everything anyone else does. It is tragic and dangerous to assert it where it does not reside, and will only work to continue to fan the race-based hate flames that so many of us are trying to quell.

Whether you regard this as a racist statement probably depends on whether you subscribe to a doctrine known as Critical Race Theory. I don’t subscribe to CRT.


The alleged Rehberg connection

Was Rep. Denny Rehberg, now running for the senate seat occupied by Jon Tester, responsible for the 15 flipped GOP votes on HB-130’s third reading? Some think so. In Something’s Rotten in the State of Montana, the Montana Cowgirl Blog reported that:

There’s a lot of buzz that Congressman Dennis Rehberg was pulling the strings at the Montana Capitol Friday, directing his henchmen to do the dirty work of vote-buying in the Montana House of Representatives, Jack Abramoff style. After all, Rehberg has plans to run for the U.S. Senate in 2012—an election year that would have been significantly impacted by a vote-by-mail system.

No one has yet presented me with any proof that condemning Montana to an all vote-by-mail system would have an impact one way or the other on the outcome of Montana’s 2012 U.S. Senate election, but it’s gospel among Democratic operatives and activists that absentee ballots accounted for Tester’s plurality win over incumbent Republican Conrad Burns in 2006, and Obama’s successful presidential campaign in 2008.

In discussing this, it’s important to understand the distinction between mail voting and early voting. In theory, a vote-by-mail system could require that ballots be postmarked only on election day. Early votes, by contrast, can be cast by mail or in person, and in Montana can be cast up to a month in advance of the election.

Democrats, and many Republicans, like early voting. They see two advantages. First, it locks in and banks votes, ensuring that the early voters actually vote and presumably vote for the party’s candidate before something happens to change their minds. Second, early voting spreads the get-out-the-vote (GOTV) effort over days or weeks, allowing the GOTV operation to run more efficiently. If Rehberg believes that early voting, and mandatory vote-by-mail, favors Democrats, Cowgirl’s report could well be true.

I think Tester won in 2006 because the Libertarian Party’s candidate, Stan Jones, received 10,377 votes, a total three times the size of the 199,845 to 196,283 Tester-Burns margin. By 2006 Burns was 71 and clearly losing his mojo. Jones gave Republicans who shuddered at the thought of Burns at 77, but who could not bring themselves to vote for a Democrat, or vote not at all, a place to go. I don’t think absentee voting had anything to do with Tester’s win. Rehberg, incidentally, defeated Monica Lindeen that year 239,124 to 158,916, with Libertarian Mike Fellows receiving 8,085 votes. Lindeen was elected Montana’s state auditor in 2008. Fellows continues to lose elections running as a Libertarian.

A vote-by-mail referendum?

That’s how Oregon decided to adopt vote-by-mail, and how Montana should decide the the matter. It’s not up to clerk and recorders to decide how we conduct elections; it’s up to the voters. And if we do put the question on the ballot, there can be no exemption for school board elections.

But before putting that question on the ballot, we need to ask whether the real problem comes from electing clerk and recorders. I think one reason that vote-by-mail is so popular amongst the clerk and recorders is that many of them are in over their heads. They started in secretarial grade jobs and worked their way up over the years, finally winning job at the polls when the former clerk and recorder either retired or lost favor with the voters. But a clerk-and-recorder is not a policy making position: it’s a skills position. We should hire election administrators on the basis of professional qualifications — and we should make that change before adopting vote-by-mail and other schemes that so many clerk and recorders view as a way to keep from working so hard.