Well, maybe not....look at this Seattle Times article today....BTW, note that the article was written by the Seattle Times Staff, and therefore the article should be objective....
Another thing, I truly wonder how many voters were at the polls per EACH hour in the 1996 election, and what the number of voters EACH hour was this election??? How did the Media blunder change the numbers...by State, and for the entire country??? Wonder how many more votes each candidate would have had???
What precincts in each State have the heaviest absentee votes? How did these precincts vote in the last 3 elections?
Also, WHAT did King Co do between 1993 to increase the number of absentee voters from 20% of the voters to 50.15% of the voters...???? Would be interesting indeed to look at how that happened, and where and what precincts the absentee votes came from....
I just want to be sure the people who voted, in EVERY STATE in the United States, actually had the RIGHT to vote....I feel very uncomfortable with the thought that people evidently voted, who had no birth certificate, or passport, or anything else to show their proof of residence in the United States.
seattletimes.nwsource.com
Saturday, December 09, 2000, 12:00 a.m. Pacific
King Co. absentees surpass traditional voters for first time
by Seattle Times Staff
A milestone in King County election history has gone almost unnoticed in the din of close races and recounts. For the first time in a general election, more King County residents voted absentee than visited their precincts on election day.
The margin of that spread, like the margin in so many of the actual races this year, was close - 2,426 votes. Bob Bruce, manager of records and elections, said there were 400,679 mail-in ballots to 398,253 poll ballots - which works out to 50.15 percent absentee.
Since state law changed in 1993 to make all voters eligible for permanent absentee status, absentee voting has skyrocketed, and Washington is now second in the nation in absentee percentage, behind Oregon, which runs mail-only elections.
"People love it; it's convenient, and it gives them a chance to do research," said Secretary of State Ralph Munro, who leaves office in January after 20 years. "I can't get through the grocery store without people stopping me and thanking me for it."
The move to mail-in voting is also apparently good for turnout: About 90 percent of King County's absentee ballots were returned - compared with only 65 percent turnout for poll voters on Nov. 7.
Bruce notes that absentees are also unaffected by weather or other vagaries of election day. In last month's general election, for example, turnout appeared to be very heavy at King County precincts throughout the day but suddenly tailed off about 6:30 to 7 p.m., Bruce said, at about the time the networks called Florida (erroneously, as it turned out) for Al Gore.
"It was just such an unusual dropoff in poll voters at that time in the night," he said.
By contrast, absentee ballots had almost all been mailed by then and would not have been affected by television reports.
However, the downside of absentee voting promises to be more delayed final counts, as in this year's Cantwell-Gorton race for Senate. Counting absentee ballots is time-consuming and costly because each ballot has to be handled individually. This year King County's absentees took two weeks to count.
Washington law requires that for each ballot an election worker compare the voter's signature on the ballot to a signature on file. Even with signatures on file in a computer system, as they are in King County, the comparison must be done by a human being.
The long wait to find out who won a close race is usually no more than an inconvenience, but elections officials worry about the prospect of a closely-fought primary campaign in which one party gets a two-week campaign head start while the other party is still waiting to find out who moves on to the general election.
To alleviate that problem, Munro and some state legislators have proposed moving Washington's primary back to June, but bills that would do that have not made it to the floor of the Legislature.
Another proposal would require ballots to be received at election offices by election day, instead of the current requirement of an election-day postmark. That would save a day or two of counting time, election officials say. Washington is the only state that still effectively permits a vote just before midnight on election night - as long as voters can get to a post office that's open late to give them the postmark.
Without the signature-checking requirement, Washington absentee ballots could be counted much more quickly, but they'd be vulnerable to fraud. Similarly, mail-in ballots that arrive before election day could be verified and counted in advance, but then there's the danger of those results becoming public and influencing the election-day voting.
"There's nobody in the world who can keep a secret," Munro said
Chart at bottom shows:
Percentage of absentee votes in King County from 1980-2000
1980: 11.8%
1993: State law changed to allow permanent absentee registration for all voters (chart shows about 20% of all votes are absentee)
2000: 50.15% votes by absentee |
