The Seattle Times wants to change the deadline for mail-in ballots:
WASHINGTON voters are no strangers to suspenseful elections — but our state has a habit of dragging the suspense out for way too long.
Secretary of State Sam Reed wants to bring elections to more decisive ends sooner. His proposal would require ballots be received in election offices by Election Day. Now, the ballots need only be postmarked by Election Day. That means ballots straggle in throughout election week, often putting off the decisive conclusion for days — given Washington’s propensity for razor-thin margins.
This, of course, is a huge problem for newspaper headline writers who require definitive results by midnight, but for the rest of us… eh, not so much. In fact, you’d think especially with our state’s “propensity for razor-thin margins” the emphasis should be on counting the ballot of every single registered voter, rather than finishing the counting on election night.
On Election Night in November, Democratic challenger Darcy Burner was leading in her bid to unseat incumbent Republican Dave Reichert for the 8th Congressional District seat. But Reichert pulled comfortably ahead over several King County and Pierce County ballot counts by Friday to win re-election.
Again, apart from the anxiety it caused the candidates and their most fervent supporters, I don’t really see what the problem is. Speedy results would be nice, but voter participation and tabulation accuracy are what we really should be shooting for when it comes to running an election. So I just don’t see why we have to make voting more difficult, and inevitably disenfranchise pathological procrastinators like me, just to get things over and done with by Tuesday night.
Think about it. Right now the deadline is clear, precise and uniform: postmarked by election day. That means in the recent special election I dropped my ballot off at the Columbia City post office by about 4PM, a good hour or so under the wire. But under the new, stricter law Sam Reed and the Times are proposing, the deadline would have been Saturday, or if you’re lucky, Monday, or maybe Friday or Thursday or even earlier, depending on where you live. Different voters would effectively have different deadlines, and they would change for every election.
That totally sucks.
No doubt Reed’s “reforms” would make things easier for election officials and the news media, but at the inevitable cost of disenfranchising voters. The Times looks at Oregon and argues the change would likely invalidate “only” a few hundred ballots… which I guess doesn’t sound like all that many unless one of those ballots is yours.
And look at MN’s Franken vs. Coleman race on the significance of a few hundred ballots.
Couple this foolish change with the post office scaling back mail delivery and we might have an election decided by 5 total ballots.
Lots of places do it that way (ballots have to be received by election day). But I’ve never been a big fan of it, for the reasons Goldy mentioned. Given that election day is on a Monday, just about all the ballots mailed within Washington State should be in by Friday, at the latest.
Don’t believe me that Goldy is irrationally obsessed with the Seattle Times? Take a look at his third sentence where he quotes the Times as saying SAM REED wants to change the deadline for mail-in ballots. But Goldy’s first sentence is “The Seattle Times wants to change the deadline for mail-in ballots.”
Not so stealthy vote-suppression.
I don’t trust Reed at all. I wish the voters would wake up about him.
Democrats like it the way it is, because their is more room for tampering. Better able to find (manufacture) new ballots, to put their candidate over the top in a close race.
Freepers everywhere rejoice:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.....67504.html
This is what starving “the beast” does. We’ll see how the nutjobs like it after a while.
Welcome to the Bush Depression
@4: If you click the link, the ST article cited is an editorial and not a report.
Goldy procrastinates with his left hand and gesticulates with his wife.
Morons like Stupes and Cyn crowed a lot about Bernie Madoff. Kind of funny since mostly the rich people they worship and love to shower with tax cuts took it in the shorts.
Now here’s something we can crow about:
http://www.independent.co.uk/n.....22987.html
Cry about the taxpayer being raped is more like it. It’ll be interesting to see what develops.
@8
Would it surprise you to learn if Goldy once applied to the Seattle Times, but he wasn’t hired, and this is what’s behind his anti-Seattle Times bias?
9. John425 spews:
Goldy has no wife….she dumped him for rather obvious reasons.
Goldy–
First, I believe Mail-In Ballots are a joke subject to lots of game-playing.
Second, as rhp pointed out, many States require folks who ELECT to Vote by Mail to have them in by Election Day.
You are whining about the system pandering to procrastinators. If you KNEW you had to mail your ballot by the Friday before I Election Day, something tells me you would make certain it was in. Your argument is foolish.
BTW–
Obama has really turned around the Stock Market, hasn’t he!
Hiring Tax Cheaters & Lobbyists after campaigning that he was raising the bar and wouldn’t has cost him a lot of political points.
$13/week of tax benefits surrounded by a few good infrastructure projects covered by hundreds of Billions of Political Pork isn’t going to help him much either.
Reed’s proposal has two other problems:
1 Modern campaigns are based on adveryising until election day. This would create disenfranchised voters who could not hear the last codas of arguement.
2. This would effectively require a different election day fot the military.
Finally, we already seeing efforts by campaigns to collectevise mail in votes from churches and other organized blocks. Reed’s rule would accerate this peactice.
Yeah, it makes tons of sense to force voters to guess correctly how slow mail service will be in order for their vote to count.
13 Cyn
…I believe Mail-In Ballots are a joke subject to lots of game-playing.
You believe. Your faith is inspiring. You believe in things for which there is no evidence.
Ummm, didn’t we move the Primary Election up 4 weeks to allow time to count late-arriving primary election ballots in time to print up the General Election ballots? If we demand “ballots in hand” by election day, then let’s move the Primary Election out of summer doldrums and back to September where it belongs.
Screw the Seattle Times! They know even less about running elections than running a newspaper.
Using different days for mailing and poll voting will only create voter confusion — “do I have to mail by Friday, or do I go to the polls on Friday?”
Can you imagine what would happen if the IRS left the tax filing deadline on April 15 but moved up the mailing deadline to, say, April 12 to speed up receipt of mailed returns? In all likelihood, millions of returns would come in late, then the IRS would assess penalties for “late filing,” then it would take troops to suppress the street riots at federal buildings across the land.
It’s a stupid idea. Sam Reed and Frank Blethen are both Republicans. Do you see the connection between these two statements?
You can count on everything Republicans do to be stupid. That’s why the voters put Democrats in charge. I trust the Democratic legislature to ensure this cockamamie confabulation dies on the vine.
@17 Cynical, like all wingnuts, is a man of strong beliefs. The flaw in their cogitive process, of course, is that believing something doesn’t make it true. Their fatal weakness is the fact their brains haven’t yet evolved to the level of being able to recognize this.
And what if damaging information comes out about a candidate just before election day? That could lead to some serious buyer’s remorse. I also don’t see a problem with ‘postmark on or before election day.’ It seems that wanting to have them in sooner is a solution in search of a problem.
Damn nutjobs are rejoicing that the state won’t be issuing tax refunds, instead keeping the money.
What % of people are out of work today.
What % of people were out of work in the carter “depression”
What % of people were out of work in the great depression.
Let us not forget hollywood just had the biggest presidents day weekend at the box office in history.
Facts put your words in the correct perspective.
I wouldn’t be surprised.
To be a modern day democrat means you have to be bitter and jealous of those that have more.
Mail service slow?
Oh yeah, government employees. Why should they work hard, the unions have guaranteed them raises based on length of employment instead of job performance.
Doesn’t matter to democrats, as evidenced by the tax cheats obama is picking for his cabinet.
@ 23
Exactly! If the inevitable revelation that the Republican candidate is a child/farm animal abuser comes out the day before election day, there will be a lot of swing mail-in voters feeling very ashamed and pissed!
The very fact that ballots trickle in over the two weeks or more after the elections shows that you can’t pick a day to mail it before the election and be assured that it will get there on time.
Dan rather tried that.
It’s hard for me to see a vast difference between the elections office receiving a massive influx of ballots on Monday and Tuesday (all of which they won’t have counted by 8pm on Tuesday anyway) versus the elections office receiving a massive influx of ballots on Wednesday and Thursday. I don’t think this reform will make much difference. It’s the counting of ballots that takes forever, not the receiving of them.
Oh, the idiot Stamm is back – does Stamm ever have anything useful to say?
Does Stamm ever talk about his heroes:
Bush – the worst President in history
McConnell – a complete idiot in the tobacco lobbies pocket
Boehner: Less intelligent than a dead frog, thinks a tax cut is the only policy and has less than zero clue what economics even are.
Yup – you can tell an idiot by the company they keep.