WASHINGTON — It looks as if some 30 percent of all voters will
cast absentee or early votes this coming election, a sixfold
increase from just two decades ago. The number could go even higher
this year if fears about electronic touch-screen machines lead many
people to conclude that the only to create a paper record of their
vote is to cast an absentee ballot.
State and local election boards are making it easier than ever
to skip out on Election Day voting. In 16 of the 20 battleground
states this November a voter will no longer need to provide an
excuse for not being able to show up physically at the polls. While
absentee voting is certainly popular with time-stressed voters, it
also substantially increases the potential for fraud. “The lack of
in-person, at-the-polls accountability makes absentee ballots the
tool of choice for those inclined to commit fraud,” the Florida
Department of Law Enforcement concluded in 1998, after all 5,200
absentee ballots cast in a Miami mayoral election were thrown out
after it was learned that “vote brokers” had illegally forged
hundreds of phony absentee ballots.
That’s why it’s worrisome that many Democrats are openly
exploiting exaggerated fears of electronic voting machines “eating”
votes and urging people to vote absentee. Several liberal
independent groups such as Americans Coming Together and MoveOn.org
are openly pushing for voters to get their ballots “in the bank” by
voting early. “It is the only way to create a paper record of your
ballot,” says Rep. Robert Wexler, a Florida Democrat who urges
every audience he addresses to cast an absentee ballot this
year.
Small wonder, then, that Florida, along with other states, is
seeing an explosion in absentee balloting. With a month to go
before the August 31 primary, Palm Beach County Elections
Supervisor Theresa LePore had received nearly three times the
number of requests her office had gotten at the equivalent time two
years ago. In 2000, she printed up 50,000 absentee ballot request
forms and “had tons left over.” This year she had to reprint the
form after the 75,000 forms she ordered were gobbled up.
Some Republicans are joining the bandwagon promoting absentee
voting. “The liberal Democrats have already begun their attacks and
the new electronic voting machines do not have a paper ballot to
verify your vote in case of a recount,” says a glossy mailer, paid
for by the Republican Party of Florida. “Make sure your vote
counts. Order your absentee ballot today.”
DESPITE ITS POPULARITY, absentee voting is a public policy failure
in achieving its goal of boosting overall voter turnout among busy
people. Despite featuring a presidential race that was tied in the
polls, the 2000 election saw only 50.7 percent of eligible voters
show up, a fraction more than the 49.1 percent who voted in the
ho-hum 1996 race. Turnout increased by 1.5 percent in states with
liberal absentee voting and by 2.6 percent in states without
it.
Curtis Gans, the director of the Committee for the Study of the
American Electorate, says that all the studies “are unequivocal in
showing that easy absentee voting decreases voter turnout.” This is
because “you are diffusing the mobilizing focus away from a single
day and having to mobilize voters over a period of time.” Gans
notes that the people who are really helped by absentee voting are
those who would cast ballots anyway, often “lazy middle class and
upper-middle class people.”
It should also be cause for concern that absentee voting allows
voters to cast ballots before they might receive useful
information, or telling insights into candidates. Ross Perot
suffered his meltdown on 60 Minutes, which saw him accuse
Republicans of disrupting his daughter’s wedding, only nine days
before Election Day in 1992. That same year, Independent Counsel
Lawrence Walsh indicted Caspar Weinberger and other figures in the
Iran-Contra scandal only four days before Election Day. The John
Huang campaign fundraising scandal accelerated in the days just
prior to the 1996 election. Author Elizabeth Drew quotes Bill
Clinton as admitting the Huang scandal prevented the Democrats from
regaining control of the House.
As noted earlier, absentee voting is also fraud-prone. In 1998,
former Democratic Congressman Austin Murphy of Pennsylvania was
convicted of absentee ballot fraud. “In this area there’s a pattern
of nursing-home administrators frequently forging ballots under
residents’ names,” says Sean Cavanagh, a Democratic county
supervisor who uncovered the scandal and was so disowned by his
party that he turned independent. CBS’s 60 Minutes created
a stir when it found people in California using mail-in forms to
register fictitious people, or pets, and then obtaining absentee
ballots in their names.
“I’m very anti-absentee ballot because of fraud and coercion,”
says Ted Selker, a computer science professor at the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology and co-director of the CalTech/MIT Voting
Technology Project. He also notes that the optical scanners used to
read most absentee ballots have as many if not more problems with
security as do electronic machines.
Numerous analysts, from George Will on the right to Norman
Ornstein on the left, have also decried the transformation of
voting into an act of convenience rather than communal pride.
Absentee ballots not only dispense with the privacy curtain of the
voting booth, but, as Will notes, “consign to private spaces the
supreme moment of public choice. Election Day should be the
exhilarating central episode of our civic liturgy.”
While it’s too late to do anything other than try to monitor and
limit fraud this election, it’s past time for the states to
reconsider if it’s a good idea to allow all voters the easy rush to
judgment that absentee voting permits. They should rein in absentee
and early voting. For if the present trends continue, they will
increase the likelihood of more disputed election outcomes
à la Florida in 2000. We need to avoid becoming a
nation where half of us vote on Election Day and the other half —
well, whenever.
