Vote from home, save your country: universal vote by mail can revive the franchise and change the political map. So why the resistance?

AuthorKeisling, Phil
PositionCover story

Jackie Pierce is an unlikely warrior for democracy. A fifty-two-year old mother of three long-since-grown children, she grew up in Flint, Michigan--all four grandparents worked at the former GM plant there--and worked for most of her career as a nursing home aide. Several years ago, she and her husband, Marshall, moved to Pellston, a small village just south of the Mackinac Bridge, which leads to northern Michigan's Upper Peninsula, to manage a Jet's Pizza franchise.

On election night in November 2014, Pierce was watching the returns, distressed less about Michigan Democrats losing (yet again) as by the state's dismal voter turnout: just 41 percent of registered voters. "And then I read on the Internet about Oregon--and how much higher their turnout was. I decided to make a few calls, and find out why."

What she learned was that Oregon and two other high-turnout states, Colorado and Washington, employ a different electoral system. Instead of requiring voters to cast ballots at official polling places, or apply for absentee ballots, these states mail ballots to all registered voters at their homes. Voters then have two weeks to fill out their ballots and either mail them back or deliver them personally to any one of hundreds of official "ballot drop sites" located strategically across their states--in, for example, schools, libraries, police and fire stations, city halls, county courthouses, post office lobbies, and secure, free-standing metal boxes that are available twenty-four hours a day.

Why shouldn't Michiganders have the same system, she thought? Several of her friends agreed. So this past summer, they founded a group called Let's Vote, Michigan! and filed a proposed ballot initiative to amend Michigan's state constitution to require all future elections, beginning in 2018, to be conducted via mailed-out ballots.

Early this past fall, Pierce bought herself a used 2008 Ford Focus--she calls the color "silver and rust"--and quickly logged more than 12,000 miles speaking before any group in Michigan that would have her, including nearly a dozen Republican central committees. Many of these Republicans, including her own state representative, have told her how much they like the idea. But she's yet to get any GOP groups or leaders to endorse the concept--and doesn't expect any. "A lot higher turnout isn't exactly a big Republican cause these days," she told me.

She's also given her spiel to labor unions and more than sixty Democratic central committees in Michigan. A Democrat herself, she hopes to convince her fellow party members that vote by mail could dramatically increase turnout and reverse a decade of near-uninterrupted Republican dominance of Michigan politics.

Yet, surprisingly, her reception from Democrati-cleaning groups has been only marginally better. Only a half-dozen Democratic central committees, plus a former lieutenant governor, have officially embraced her proposal. "I think the postal worker and letter carrier unions have endorsed the effort--but I'm still waiting on their official letters," she explained. Other key Democrats and labor leaders tell Pierce they first need to raise $30,000 to conduct a statewide poll. None of the big national progressive groups fighting for voter rights and increased access to the ballot--like Demos, the Brennan Center for Justice, Common Cause, or Project Vote--have offered any support, either.

"Michigan Democrats have been losing for so long, they just aren't thinking straight," says an exasperated Jack Lessenberry, a Wayne State University professor of communications who writes a regular column on government and politics for a chain of local newspapers. "I can't help but think that instead of putting millions behind other proposals that are doomed to fail, unions and progressive groups might be better off funding vote by mail first."

Presidential elections still attract a majority of America's voters. For all other elections, however, democracy is mostly a spectator sport. In the 2014 midterms, just 83 million registered voters cast ballots--a nosedive of almost 10 million from 2010's already anemic levels. Almost 110 million registered voters were no-shows--for a registered voter turnout rate of just 44 percent. Add another 40 million eligible but unregistered citizens, and the rate was just 36 percent.

Turnout in primary nomination contests is even lower--for instance, just 18 percent of registered voters participated in the 2012 cycle. This is a major factor pulling both parties, but especially the GOP, to the extremes, and it should be especially worrisome to Republican and Democratic moderates and the 42 percent of Americans who now identify as "none of the above." An estimated 90 percent of the nation's 435 congressional seats and 7,383 state legislative seats are noncompetitive between the major parties. Win the dominant party primary, and the November election is a mere formality.

Fiscal conservatives, too, have reason to worry about low voter turnout, if for no other reason than the costs that taxpayers in many states are incurring to ameliorate it, such as keeping polls open longer. Voting as traditionally done--with 110,000 polling stations and 800,000 poll workers--is expensive. Just to upgrade or replace the hundreds of thousands of aging touchscreen voting machines could easily cost states and localities $2 billion in the next decade.

Low voter turnout, however, should really trouble progressives, because the voters who don't show up at the polls (including the ones who vote in presidential years but not in off years) are disproportionately Democratic in their orientation and propensity.

Democrats and their progressive allies aren't bereft of ideas to boost voter participation. Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders are both championing promising reforms, such as automatically registering all American citizens based on driver's licenses or birth records. But no other solution holds anywhere near the potential to boost actual voter turnout. Evidence from Oregon, Colorado, and Washington suggests that if other states adopted universal vote by mail (UVBM), they could increase their registered voter turnout in midterm elections by 10 to 15 percent. Even more dramatically, they could double or triple their primary election turnout, which would almost certainly reduce the inordinate influence of take-no-prisoners ideologues. (See "Can Vote by Mail Reduce Partisan Extremism?," page 41.)

Universal vote by mail has many other virtues, too. Those odious photo ID laws? Rendered moot; you don't need a voter ID to fill out a ballot at your own kitchen table. Long polling place lines? How about no lines, period--and no way for elected officials to manufacture them by (whoops!) providing too few polling places in certain neighborhoods?

Universal vote by mail has also proven to be at least as secure from fraud--and arguably more so--as traditional voting at polls. Election officials check each voter's signature on the ballot return envelope, matching it against the voter registration card before the ballot is counted. (Since signatures can change, voters still have time to update their registration cards--and qualify their ballots--before results are officially certified.)

Universal vote by mail has the additional advantage of being less costly to taxpayers than the traditional method. Beginning in 2000, Oregon taxpayers started saving $3 million per election cycle. Or consider California's San Diego County, where election officials found that in a 2013 special election for mayor the direct cost of operating their polling places--$360,000, for 32 percent of votes cast--far exceeded that of the "mailed out" portion--$84,000, for 68 percent of votes cast.

Getting UVBM adopted in a lot more states needn't be held hostage to partisan gridlock in Washington and state capitals, either. Indeed, it could become law relatively quickly in twenty-one other states, including Michigan, that allow citizens like Jackie Pierce to put new laws or constitutional amendments on the ballot through the initiative process.

This, of course, presumes that politically powerful groups and individuals can bestir themselves to fund the signature gathering, publicity, and organizing needed for these initiatives to succeed. And that's not happening--yet--in Michigan, or anywhere else for that matter. The reason is that too many election experts and democracy advocates, the very people who should be championing universal vote by mail, remain unpersuaded at best, and dismissive at worst. As a result, the single most promising reform to strengthen America's flagging democratic franchise and change the political map is being overlooked in favor of far less effective ideas that likely will prove disappointing.

The problem of low voter turnout is least apparent in presidential contests, where the media frenzy and the billions spent by campaigns, political parties, and outside groups on advertising and get-out-the-vote efforts reach all but the most oblivious of voters. Though far lower than similar elections in most other advanced democracies, America's 70 percent registered voter turnout in recent presidential races is stellar compared to what happens in midterm and party primary contests.

In 2014, registered voter turnout averaged a paltry 44 percent. About 83 million votes were cast--as calculated by the U.S. Election Project of University of Florida--out of 190 million total registered voters, as the fifty states reported to the federal Election Assistance Commission. The EAC reports have some reliability issues, however, and state voter registration rolls vary in how well they're maintained and updated. (Some states, for instance, report more total registered voters than they have eligible citizens.)

To compare state-to-state registered voter turnout performance, a better denominator uses the fifty states' 175 million "active" registered voters (ARVs), separated out from about...

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