Election 2008: What’s At Stake?

“Super Tuesday” could be called “Super January” in California, where as many half of registered voters may have voted by mail instead of going in person to polling places. About 5 million vote-by-mail ballots, formerly called “absentee ballots,” were issued for this primary election, according to Steven J. Ybarra, a former chair of the Chicano caucus of the Democratic Party who is privy to the statistics from the office of the California Secretary of State.The earliest ballots were mailed out during the first week of January, around the same time as the Iowa caucus and New Hampshire primary. This gave Californians about four weeks to vote for their preferred presidential candidates and for various propositions. Permanent vote-by-mail voters automatically received ballots in the mail, while others were able to request a ballot as early as 29 days and as late as seven days ahead of Feb. 5. Voters either mailed them back or dropped them off in person at polling places on Election Day before 8 p.m. to be counted.As of Friday, Feb. 1, returns in California counties were as high as 61 percent and as low as 41 percent, according to Ybarra. Ybarra is a consultant, heavily involved in raising the participation of Latino voters through the vote-by-mail system.The term “absentee ballot” was changed in 2007 to “vote-by-mail” by the California Secretary of State Debra Bowen in order to clarify and promote its usage. One does not have to be away from his home precinct to apply for a mailed ballot. Anyone can request to be a permanent vote-by-mail (VBM) voter.Hear Ybarra talk about the stigma of the term “absentee”:Having such a large percentage of voters submit their ballots by mail creates different benefits and challenges to their processing, counting and announcing of results. The biggest controversy among advocates and opponents is the consequence of voting too early.“There’s a real disadvantage for the people who vote too early, because there haven’t been necessarily the debates, there hasn’t been the campaign advertising yet, the mail hasn’t gone out. It makes it hard because you want this election to be a state conversation about what’s going on with these initiatives or with the candidates, and because people are voting at so many different times apart, you can’t have that statewide dialogue,” said Kim Alexander, president and founder of the California Voter Foundation.Alexander said her foundation had to put up information on their Web site as early as the Christmas holidays, because they knew people would start to get their ballots by January 7. They’ve never posted information that early before.The problem with voting too early is that sometimes candidates drop out of the race during the month leading up to the primary. Ybarra said, “I talked to a bunch of Edwards voters that had voted and a bunch of Kucinich voters who had voted for Kucinich. And they said, ‘you know we’re confident, we’re happy we voted the way we did. We would not have voted for Hillary or Obama anyway.’ And you know, you get a few people who will call and say ‘yeah, I took my ballot and I had it marked, and I went down and traded it in for another ballot. Destroyed that one, and voted at the registrar’s office’.”Others are concerned with the delay that mailed ballots could cause in announcing election results. But Ybarra argues returns could actually come faster with vote-by-mail ballots. “I remember I arrived at the Democratic headquarters at 8:02, and they said were calling the election for Boxer, and I said, ‘what?!’ You know, because of the absentee ballot returns that were electronically counted,” Ybarra said, remembering Boxer’s run for reelection.What he’s referring to is the process in counting ballots that are mailed back ahead of Election Day. The envelopes go through the signature verification process, where the signature on the envelope is matched to the signature on the person’s voter registration card. If they match, the envelope and ballot are separated, the ballot is run through a machine just like a paper ballot at a polling station, and the result is catalogued and locked in a computer system. These results are not released until polls close at 8:00 p.m. on Election Day. But that means at 8:01 on Feb. 5, there could be as many as three million votes already counted.A polling place in South Los Angeles:

But the vote-by-mail ballots that are delivered in person to polling places before 8:00 p.m. have to go through the same signature verification process. The time it takes to do that means the results from last-minute vote-by-mail ballots may not be released right away. So the earliest results come from previously received vote-by-mail ballots, while the latest results are from vote-by-mail ballots turned in the day of the election.

“You know it’s the news reporters and editors, and the local campaigns that are the most anxious for election results. I think most voters are perfectly happy to wait until the day after the election to wake up and find out what happened, or even on Thursday…it’s just such a tired old story for people to talk about, oh we might have to wait a couple of extra hours to get election results. I’ve been getting a lot of questions from reporters about that this election season, and it’s just such a non-story. The truth is that Wednesday morning, Feb. 6, California voters are going to wake up and they’re going to have a pretty good idea of which presidential candidate fared the best in California. We may not know exactly how many delegates were awarded each candidate in each party, but we’ll know who won the most votes,” Alexander said.

There are 14 states with heavy usage of vote-by-mail ballots, according to Ybarra. For these states, including California, the results of the primaries reflect an advantage on the earlier frontrunners. Indeed, with 75 percent of California precincts reporting, Clinton leads at 53 percent of the popular vote.Gentry Lange is a strong opponent to the vote-by-mail system and works out of Washington State for the “No Vote-By-Mail” organization and Web site. “The highly moneyed campaigns are going to benefit the most. What used to be a get-out-the-vote campaign the weekend before Election Day…has now turned into get-out-the-vote month,” Lange said.Ybarra said that the early voting probably benefited Sen. Clinton during this primary season, but said that no candidate made a serious effort to campaign early on in California. “They were all stuck in trying to deal with Iowa and South Carolina…Instead, they’re running around doing television ad campaigns the last weekend. I mean, I can anticipate there’ll be political advertising during the Super Bowl. What a waste of money!”Another point of controversy surrounding vote-by-mail ballots is the questionable secrecy of the mailed ballot. “Any number of people can coerce your vote from a controlling spouse to a union bosses and workplace employers and there’s plenty of different situations where this has occurred in the States and around the world, that allows vote-buying to be enabled, because the only check against a vote-by-mail system is the signature through a signature validation process. There are numerous cases of people using vote-by-mail to stuff the ballots,” Lange said.Ybarra, however, says the question of secrecy is nonsense:Regarding secrecy in processing of these ballots, Alexander said, “The tricky thing about vote by mail ballots is that you need to verify that voter to make sure that person is a valid voter and their signature matches their signature on their voter registration card, but you also need to keep their ballot private and make sure that you’re not keeping that person’s name associated with the ballot. So there are procedures in place at county election offices to try to preserve ballot secrecy for vote by mail ballots.”The final consideration may be the balance between the convenience of voting by mail and the effectiveness of counting them. For Ybarra, voting by mail naturally fits a mobile society.“Well, we work. We go out early in the morning and we come home late at night,” Ybarra said. “When you worked all day long, and you come home at night, and you walk in the door, and you think to yourself, ‘oh yeah, I gotta vote.’ Which is problematic because you’re seeing the returns come in from the East Coast, you figure the election has been decided in other places, and primaries in general, so you sit down and have dinner with your family.”However, Lange argues that delays with the U.S. Postal Service may disenfranchise voters whose ballots arrive after Election Day.“You can run into that cut-off date being the date of disenfranchisement. Let’s say you mailed it two weeks early, and it didn’t arrive until after Election Day even though you thought you mailed it with plenty of time,” Lange said. For the same reason, Alexander advises voters to hold onto their ballots and walk them into polling places on Feb. 5 if it’s within a week of the primary date.A little known fact among voters is that since ballots were mailed out in early January, any person could have walked into a registrar’s office to vote, according to Ybarra. “That process is sometimes facilitated by the registrars, where they will actually set up voting stations in places where they know there has been traditionally low voter turnout to encourage voters to come and vote. So you have many choices in methodologies to be enfranchised,” he said.Ybarra still encourages voters, especially Latinos, to vote by mail. It was Ybarra’s encounter with racism at the polls that triggered his advocacy for mailing in ballots:But the method of voting at the polls is something Alexander described as a valued tradition. “The majority of California voters are stilling go to the polls, and voting at the polls on Election Day. And I don’t think we should lose sight of that. A lot of people still value the experience of going to the polls, and being there with their neighbors and doing it in person. And I think it’s something that we need to preserve and promote,” she said.Perhaps the trend to vote by mail will increase as it has consistently over the past few years. But at least according to Alexander, it will be unlikely for California to become 100 percent vote-by-mail as Oregon does. For now, going to a polling place, filling out a ballot and getting an “I voted” sticker is still an integral part of the election experience.Click here to listen to more about electronic voting problems vs. paper ballots:Ybarra on Sacramento software glitch: Alexander on electronic voting problems in 2004: