DETROIT – What a difference a week makes: Michigan voters trooped to the polls on March 10, when there were only a few hundred cases of coronavirus nationwide, and only one in Michigan.
Seven days later, Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine postponed his state’s March 17 primary at the last minute, in a move that was controversial but which now looks like exactly the right thing to have done.
Besides the health risk, the three states which did vote on St. Patrick’s Day had sharply lower turnout from past years.
Governor DeWine set June 2 as the new date, but that was immediately thrown into confusion as lawmakers questioned whether he had the authority to do that, lawsuits were filed, and one legislator floated the idea of allowing everyone to vote absentee for four weeks.
Other states have postponed their primaries too, and the situation remains extremely fluid. But we do know this: No matter how bad the situation gets, Oregon’s May 19 primary won’t have to be postponed. Neither will Hawaii’s April 4 primary.
That’s because those states vote entirely by mail.
Twenty years ago, Oregon became the first state to go an entirely all-mail voting system. Every registered voter in the state gets a ballot mailed to them weeks before the election.
They can fill them out (or not) and mail them in (postage is free) or place them off at one of many drop-off sites around the state.
The result has been a huge increase in turnout –and an estimated $3 million in savings for the state every election, since Oregon no longer has to staff and run precinct voting places.
Four years ago, 80.3 percent of registered Oregon voters cast ballots in November, compared to 63 percent in Ohio and Michigan. That, incidentally, was one of the lower turnouts in recent history; it was more that 85 percent in both 2004 and 2008.
Polls show an astonishing 81 percent of Oregonians strongly approve of their vote by mail system. Since Oregon made the switch to all-mail voting, Washington, Colorado and Hawaii have done the same, and Utah is in the process of doing so.
Some California counties are now all vote-by-mail, and about two-thirds of California counties case mail-in ballots.
Voting by mail would certainly solve the problem of having an election in the age of social distancing. But in the past, bills designed to convert the entire nation to a vote-by-mail system have gone nowhere in Congress, for a number of reasons.
Some members, Democrats as well as Republicans, fear it would create opportunities for fraud — although there’s no evidence that any has ever occurred, and there’s no way computer hackers can do anything about the U.S. Post Office.
However, some Republicans oppose vote-by-mail because higher turnouts normally are better for Democrats. Oregon and Washington were once swing states that leaned Republican; they chose Gerald Ford over Jimmy Carter, for example.
But both are now solidly Democratic, and once staunchly Republican Colorado voted with them for Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Vote-by-mail voting wasn’t the only reason for their shift, and the current epidemic has revived interest in perhaps going to a nationwide mail voting system. Democratic Senators Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and Ron Wyden of Oregon have introduced a bill requiring states offer this option if one-quarter of the nation has declared a national emergency because of a disease or disaster.
New Jersey is going to conduct municipal elections by mail, and in Connecticut, the secretary of state wants to give voters in that state’s April 28 primary the option of voting absentee.
Michigan, in fact, had so-called “no-reason” absentee voting for the first time in a statewide primary election this year, after the voters amended the state constitution to allow it in 2018.
As a result, the use of absentee ballots, which can be either mailed or dropped off, soared. Nearly one million were requested for the March 10 primary, and more than 800,000 returned.
That meant almost 40 percent of all votes cast were absentee.
Those who support voting by mail also note that it offers voters time to cast a truly responsible ballot. In many places, November general election ballots are filled with dozens of races, from President to township, judicial and school board officials, plus often complex ballot proposals, many of which have to do with raising taxes.
Voters who get a ballot in the mail have days to study it and research the candidates and issues, if they are so inclined.
Ohio may not have the time or the staff to convert to a voting by mail system before this year’s primary – if it is held on June 2.
But there are all sorts of reasons, coronavirus among them, that Ohio, Michigan and the rest of the country may wish to convert to a purely voting by mail system as soon as they possibly can.
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(Editor’s Note: A version of this column also appeared in the Toledo Blade.)
