The Oregon Plan

Klackamas County could teach Cuyahoga County a thing or two

© Bryan Zepp Jamieson

http://www.zeppscommentaries.com/Politics/vote2.htm

12/13/04

There hasn’t been much to do about investigating the 2004 election here in Siskiyou County. The national clearing house of "voting incidents" which lists some 38,000 election incidents, has exactly one for this area. The voter "‘sent in registration to alameda [sic] county [some 250 miles distant], but gave siskyou [sic] address.’ Siskyou doesn't have him as registered. not sure if Alameda forwarded his registration." Try as you might, it’s hard to build a really satisfyingly paranoid conspiracy theory around something like that.

California in general was free of the sorts of problems seen in places like Florida and Ohio. While there were 3,200 incidents reported, most were of the "registered in wrong county" variety. One notable one read, "Caller indicated he was a registered voter in Los Angeles County but relocated to San Diego county approximately six months ago. Caller requested information on where he should go to vote. Caller stated he had not re-registered in San Diego County at any time. I explained the October 18, 2004 deadline for re-registration in San Diego County and informed him it was likely he would not be permitted to vote in the election. Caller stated he would contact the Los Angeles County office to speak with it tomorrow to see if it could find a way to permit him to vote." What made it remarkable was that the incident report transpired in Santa Barbara County, 100 miles from Los Angeles and 180 miles from San Diego.

Part of the credit for the general smoothness of the California election must go to Secretary of State Kevin Shelley, who stood firm and ruled that electronic touch-screen machines were not reliable or secure, and that all voting must have a paper trail. As a result, California appears to have had an honest election, with only the usual number of problems, most minor, and usually attributable to nothing more ominous than human bone-headedness.

Oregon, however, had an incredibly good record that put California – and the rest of the country – to shame. The entire state only reported 122 incidents, and the majority were people who were out of county and didn’t know where to mail (or "drop off" their ballots), or who didn’t register, or who hadn’t heard that all voting was by mail. Statewide, about 50 people hadn’t heard you had to mail in your vote, an astoundingly low number. Only a handful of incidents could be considered major – someone claiming to be from the Sierra Club went door to door in Portland, "collecting ballots," and one guy claimed someone poured gasoline on his house and tried to set fire to it, and it was the homeowner’s opinion that a Bush/Cheney sign in the yard had something to do with it.

Oregon had a returned ballot rate of 85%, making it the state with the highest voter participation in the United States by a sizeable margin. Several counties had voter participation rates above 90%.

Oregon didn’t have questions raised about touch-screen voting, because there are no touch-screen voting machines in Oregon. All registered voters got their ballots in the mail in early October, and had until election day to mail them in. Optical scan machines, the most reliable and trustworthy tabulators available, tallied the vote quickly and accurately. In the event of a close race that demanded a recount, or in the event of data loss caused by software failure or machine glitches, the ballots were there to be counted.

So: extraordinarily high voter involvement, and accurate tallies. I bet the Putsch junta just hates that.

Oregon missed out on a whole bunch of other problems that the country at large experienced in the past three elections.

No long lines at polling places – no polling places.

No shortage of polling workers – none needed. The day before the election, the media got around to mentioning that the US as a whole faced a shortage of qualified poll workers to the tune of half a million people.

No peremptory challenges of voters at polling places by partisans. In areas where a corrupt secretary of state blessed the practice, GOP hacks were allowed to challenge the right of people to vote at polling places. Not surprisingly, far more blacks than whites were so challenged by these goons.

No trouble getting time off work to vote. Incredibly, only a couple of states have laws requiring employers to give employees time off to vote. (In most countries, voting day is a national holiday). But in Oregon, where people had several weeks in which to fill out their ballots and mail it in, even the busiest worker had time to vote, and employers weren’t given something else to whine about.

No exit polls. Republicans should be happy about that, since exit polls, far from being inaccurate, provided an embarrassing record of where shenanigans in the past few elections had the greatest effect. But Republicans insist they want to get rid of them because they’re inaccurate. Oregon was happy to oblige.

Various predictions of disaster had been made while Oregon was setting up its mail-in vote experiment. Pundits and other snootsayers claimed that people would get their ballots in the mail, stick them under the phone book, and forget all about them, resulting in reduced voter returns. Predictions were also made of widespread confusion, with thousands of people milling around elementary school gyms, national guard armories and rec centers, baffled and angry that there were no voting booths.

The rate of ballot return indicates that Oregonians were neither absent-minded nor confused.

Another complaint was that people voting at home could be dominated or coerced by other family members. It’s impossible to tell if that happened, and if so, if it happened to any significant extent. But it seems to me that anyone capable of exerting such psychic domination over a spouse or child or elderly parent that they can force them to fill out a ballot in accordance with their wishes probably doesn’t need to be standing right there to exert that sort of influence, and there would be no degree of difference in the Oregon model, or any state that has absentee balloting.

The Oregon model also made that favorite tactic of campaign consultants, the last minute smear, much less effective. The results showed that over half of Oregon voters had mailed their ballots in by October 27^th, six days before the election, and only about 12% waited until the last day to send their ballots in.

The final complaint against the Oregon model is probably the only one that had any validity. Some people missed going to the polling place and drawing the curtain and punching out the cards or writing in the Xs or whatever. Doing it at home just wasn’t the same. No smile from the librarian, no presentation of an "I voted" sticker to wear for the rest of the day, no sense of joining the rest of the country in a shared experience.

While I can empathize with that, I note that in places like Florida and Ohio, and in any place that uses Diebold or E S & S technology, it had already become an empty and meaningless ritual. If Oregonians missed the ritual, they could at least take solace in the realization that, unlike places like Florida, their votes actually meant something and would be counted accurately.

But I do have one small suggestion for an improvement to pass along to the Oregon Secretary of State: include an "I voted" sticker with the ballot when you send them out. People can at least stick it on after they’ve dropped their ballot in the mail box. No reason why they shouldn’t have that small pleasure.

And besides, if someone comes along claiming to be "gathering ballots for the Sierra Club," the voters can just smile, point to their lapels, and say, "Too late, asshole. Now why don’t you beat it before I call the police?"