Diane Sands of Missoula, newly elected state legislator from House District 95, lived in Oregon for a short time and got the chance to see that state’s vote-by-mail system work.
Now Sands plans to use the Oregon model in legislation she’ll propose during the next session of the Montana Legislature that would make mail ballots an option for the state’s 56 counties.
Part of her interest in sending out the vote rather than getting out the vote also comes from her background as a women’s historian coupled with her curiosity about how different segments of our society acquired the right to vote.
“People paid with their lives for that vote and every other vote with the extension of suffrage to different groups,” Sands said, “whether it’s Native Americans not being citizens until 1924 or what’s going on in the rest of the world in saying ‘this is about democracy.’”
Sands said it breaks her heart that so few people vote in Montana and the United States. Even the 63 percent turnout in Missoula County Nov. 7 was a far cry, she added, from turnouts that occur in other democratic countries around the world.
She has some first-hand knowledge of how Montana’s system works having served on the Missoula County Elections Advisory Committee and as a polling place manager. Sands noted that it takes around 600 people to run the polling places just in Missoula County.
On Nov. 7 she worked as co-manager at Hellgate Elementary School, the largest polling place in the county based on number of precincts served.
Sands has seen the frustration borne by someone who wanted to vote but had to be told he or she hadn’t registered or couldn’t register for whatever reason.
Working on ballot measures in Oregon gave her hands-on experience with vote-by-mail, and she said she also worked closely with the secretary of state’s office there on public financing of elections.
When she received her first Oregon ballot in the mail that included some 30 or so ballot measures Sands found it particularly helpful to have time to sit down and really think about what or who she was voting for or against.
“(I spent) an entire afternoon going through all of the issues and taking several hours to vote that ballot,” she recalled, noting that the four-page Missoula County ballot this time around solidified her memory of that Oregon voting experience.
Sands said Oregon now has voter participation topping 80 percent on average. While it’s still not 100 percent it’s a far cry higher than what Montana and many other states normally achieve.
“I know there’s always the issues of should people be voting if they’re not well-enough informed,” she noted, “but actually the more people that vote the more it catches their interest to get educated about voting.”
Sands sees vote-by-mail as the “single best strategy we currently have in front of us that would encourage more people to vote and to make it easier for people to vote.”
She already has promoted the bill before the state’s clerks and recorders association knowing that if they didn’t back the idea it probably won’t happen. Sands said group members from both major political parties seem highly supportive of the idea.
Sands also is enough of a realist to realize that, “as legislative things run,” it may not pass the first time it’s proposed. But she also said she thinks it will.
For those who worry about what vote-by-mail will do to the ballot counting process Sands said it works much like Montana’s current absentee voting process.
Oregon requires that the ballots be returned by 8 p.m. on Election Day. For those in Montana who say they would miss the chance to go to the polling place and see their neighbors Sands said Oregon has drop-off sites that look a lot like mini-polling places.
Those sites require that only one person be there to collect ballots “versus a whole raft of polling judges and the kind of staffing that it takes to run a full election” under Montana’s current system.
And what about the cost of a mail ballot system? Sands said there are significant costs incurred from mailing costs in particular, but those costs are offset by not having to hire hundreds of polling place workers.
Sands also said vote-by-mail wouldn’t necessarily eliminate the possibility of registering to vote even on Election Day. For the first time Montanans were allowed to register right up until the time the polls closed Nov. 7.
Sands added that there will need to be some adjustments made to the absentee process, hopefully by the 2007 Legislature. The process was extended to 45 days primarily to facilitate getting ballots to military and others overseas in a timely manner. It didn’t work the way it was intended because military absentee ballots were processed with all of the others.
Under the legislation Sands will propose, each Montana county will have the option to use vote-by-mail or maintain the current system. That option would be in effect from election to election.
“As that plays out over the years it may become permanent for everything,” Sands said, “but at this point it would be county option.”
Even though Montana doesn’t have a history - at least a recent history - of election fraud, Sands said it’s always a concern.
With Montana’s new statewide registration system in place, elections officials will be able to cross check signatures on file with the state with those on the envelopes containing the mail-in ballots. And information about who voted and who didn’t in a given election would easily be kept up to date, Sands said.
She also talked about an interesting phenomenon that occurred in Montana this election year. Because of the high statewide interest in the U.S. Senate race and the proposal to increase the minimum wage political operatives were busy months before the election encouraging people to vote absentee.
“Because that happened so early in the summer and was so massive a lot of people were signed up for absentee ballots (that) didn’t want an absentee ballot,” Sands said. “And in Missoula County the majority of our provisional ballots weren’t because someone had forgotten their ID.
“(Most) of them were people who had lost their absentee ballot, couldn’t find it, didn’t know if they ever got it, or didn’t want to vote it and didn’t even know how they came to get it,” she said.
When those people showed up at their polling place they were listed as already having voted and had to submit a provisional ballot.
Sands sees other potential stumbling blocks to a vote-by-mail system in Montana, one being what she called the culture of voting.
“Again the argument is, ‘well, if people don’t take the initiative to get off their rear ends to go down there and sign up and vote they shouldn’t be allowed to vote anyway because they don’t know anything,’” Sands said.
“And the second one is people that like that culture of, they’re gonna miss going down to a polling place and it’s so wonderful to be among your neighbors casting their ballot.”
Sands sees those two as the only logical arguments against vote-by-mail, and she thinks making it optional by county should balance out those concerns.
“Change is tough, even in the election world,” Sands said. “But the importance of having every voter vote, and every vote count, to me is the most important of the fundamental democratic principles around elections, and that’s what this would help move forward.”
Coming up next - Missoula County elections supervisor Vickie Zeier looks back and forward at the elections process.
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