Some people find voting on Election Day to inconvenient to make the effort - How much should we accommodate everyone's individual whim, at what price?

Last year, Governor Pawlenty vetoed an omnibus elections provision bill that would have made some pretty radical changes in the way elections are conducted in Minnesota. Our system is in need of an overhaul, but the bill passed on an entirely party line vote by Democrats in the legislature last year was the opposite of what’s needed. 

There were some good points in the bill, but it’s overall effect was to loosen up an already very liberal and trusting election system.

 

One element of the bill was early voting. The proposal would have opened up elections to a one-week window instead of holding elections on a single day. Minnesota Majority objected to the plan for several reasons.

 

While we think voting is a civic duty and want to encourage every eligible voter to get informed and exercise their right, we also don’t believe that the integrity of our elections should take a back seat to convenience. Convenience is really the only argument in favor of early voting, but there are many compelling reasons to reject it.

 

On Election Day, citizen oversight is a critical process to instilling confidence in the fairness of the process. Trained citizen election judges administer the ballots and report results, while volunteers from the political parties are permitted to observe the process. With early voting, both of these safeguards and guarantees of transparency are impossible. We could never find and pay enough citizen election judges to take a week off work to administer 7 days of voting, so we would have to rely entirely on election bureaucrats to collect and count ballots. Likewise, volunteer poll watchers from the political parties would no longer be viable. Who can afford to take a week off work to watch municipal election offices all day, day in and day out?

 

Right now, the potential for abuse of our permissive election system is somewhat minimized by time constraints. A person intent on fraud could only do so much damage, traveling from precinct to precinct attempting to cast multiple ballots, because of the time constraints. Allowing in-person ballots with no ID requirement for an entire week opens the window for fraud alarmingly wide.

 

On Monday, the state Senate Committee on State and Local Government Operations and Oversight held a discussion on early voting. Senator Katie Sieben arranged for four people to testify in favor of enacting early voting in Minnesota. Two were citizens who had received a phone call from either the Franken or Coleman campaign informing them that their absentee ballot had been rejected.

 

Tami Carpenter of Plymouth was told her ballot was rejected because the signature on her absentee ballot didn’t match her application. Dennis Hansen of Woodbury wasn’t given a reason. They said their absentee ballots were wrongly rejected. Without examining the absentee ballots in question, it’s impossible to know why election judges rejected the ballots, but rejected ballots were gone over with a fine-tooth comb during the Coleman-Franken recount.

 

They asserted early voting would reduce the number of absentee ballots, save time money and prevent confusion. Mr. Hansen noted that had he been able to vote early in person instead of mailing in his absentee ballot, any errors would have been caught and corrected right away, thereby ensuring his vote was counted.

 

What Mr. Hansen apparently doesn’t know, and Senator Sieben failed to mention is that Absentee ballots can already be cast in person at municipal election offices, with help from election staff. The solution being sought already exists.

 

Laura Fredrick-Wang of the League of Women Voters also testified before the committee. She said that current absentee voting laws “compel people to misstate their reason for voting absentee,” because some people who want to vote absentee don’t fall under one of the 4 legally defined acceptable reasons. Essentially, this argument is that the laws established to prevent abuse of the absentee voting privilege force people to commit voter fraud.

 

Fredrick-Wang went on to say that the requirement to state one of four reasons to vote absentee create a “necessary barrier” to voting. She cited examples of people who may not know for sure whether they’d be in, or pregnant women who could wind up in the hospital delivering a baby on Election Day.

 

Senator Gerlach countered by reading the statute on absentee ballots, pointing out that those circumstances are already provided for in the law, under the “reasonable expectation” language.

 

Fredrick-Wang responded that it doesn’t matter if those situations are covered by the acceptable excuses for absentee voting, saying, “it’s just easier to vote early than to vote absentee.”

 

At that point, Senator Gerlach had an “ah-ha” moment. “So this isn’t really about barriers to voting. I’m disappointed. You stared out talking about absolute barriers but now you are saying it’s really just about convenience. While I’m all for making things convenient – we shouldn’t erect needless obstacles to voting – we have to balance convenience with confidence in the outcome of elections. Confidence, in my view has to take precedence.”

 

Senator Gerlach is right. Minnesota already enjoys the nation’s highest level of voter participation. There’s no need to further simplify voting at the potential expense of integrity.

 

While all citizens have the right to vote, there is not necessarily a right to absentee ballots, but our society has decided to create the privilege as a convenience. We are already taking the step of accommodating people who choose to be out of the country on Election Day, the obvious exception being military service, where a person could be deployed overseas and have no other choice but to be absent on Election Day. We certainly have no obligation to change the date of an election to accommodate certain individuals preferences.

 

Early voting creates a host of potential issues, like the afore mentioned larger window for abuse and the elimination of citizen oversight of voting. In addition, circumstances change. When Senator Wellstone was unexpectedly killed in a plane crash during the campaign, new ballots had to be hastily created for Election Day. If early voting had been allowed, the people who cast votes for Wellstone in advance of the election would have wasted their ballots in the Senate race. With everyone voting on the same day, we all have access to the same information before casting a ballot and in the case of Absentee ballots, they can be overridden by a subsequent absentee or in-person ballot. Early voting would not accommodate that circumstance.