The Problems with All-Mail Elections
With the Clinton and Obama camps at odds over whether to seat Florida and Michigan delegates, the idea of holding an all-mail election has emerged as a possible solution. The New York Times reports today that Democratic Party officials are "close to completing a draft plan" for a mail-in primary in Florida that would take place in early June. Proponents of all-mail voting often cite Oregon's experience in support of their arguments. If they can do it, the argument goes, why can't we?
Given that Democratic Party rules set clear standards for having delegates recognized, which Florida and Michigan just as clearly failed to abide by, it seems obvious that the delegates selected through those states' prior primaries shouldn't be recognized. At the same time, there are reasons to be very cautious about exporting all-mail elections to these states, especially in a hotly contested and undeniably important race like this one. Here are a few of those reasons:
- Lack of experience. All-mail elections would be new to Florida. It's certainly true that some voters in Florida and other states already vote by mail, in the form of absentee ballots. But having everyone vote by mail is a major change that raises a different set of issues. In Oregon, the transition to all-mail elections was made gradually, over two decades as summarized in this timeline. Trying to implement all-mail voting on an extremely accelerated schedule would invite trouble. This is particularly true for a state like Florida, to put it mildly, doesn't exactly have a trouble-free history of election administration. With so much at stake, this isn't a great time to experiment.
- Security. The likelihood of fraud and other forms of electoral manipulation is frequently exaggerated. But to the extent foul play happens, it's most likely to occur with mail-in ballots. That's partly because the anonymity of the ballot is compromised, allowing people to buy and sell their votes in a way that's not possible with in-precinct voting, as Rick Hasen has pointed out. It's also because lots of things that can happen to a ballot between the time it's goes from election authorities to the voter and back again. Suppose some election insider has a list of "deadwood" on the rolls (i.e., people who've died or moved yet remain on the rolls) and is able to intercept those ballots before they get into the mail? Or suppose someone has a connection at the post office? This isn't to argue that these things often happen -- there's not much evidence of such fraud in Oregon, according to this report by Paul Gronke. But again, Oregon's got a long history of dealing with the problems with mail voting, and not much history of corruption. By contrast, there has been fraud with mail ballots in Florida, specifically in a Miami mayoral election in which absentee ballots were found at the home of a local political boss, as noted by Prof. Gronke (at p. 2).
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http://moritzlaw.osu.edu/blogs/tokaji/2008/03/problems-with-all-mail-elections.html