Snoqualmie Valley residents who fear their vote could be compromised by King County’s vote-by-mail program are right to be concerned, according to Kathy Lambert,whose District 3 on the King County Council encompasses more than 1,000 square miles of territory that will not have a regional voting center.
The county council, in a 5-4 party-line vote, agreed July 29 to place three such facilities in urban King County, but nixed a proposal to locate a fourth in largely rural eastern King County, most of which falls in Lambert’s district.
Voters in the upcoming November general election will, as in years past, have the option of casting their ballots by mail or in person at their local precincts.
But in 2009, that local in-person vote will be eliminated for Snoqualmie Valley residents, who will have to travel as far as Bellevue or Renton to squelch concerns that their vote will be cast securely.
The county will provide some 39 ballot drop locations in place of precincts, but Lambert’s constituents will not have the ability to vote in the manner many have grown accustomed to.
In a recent telephone interview, Lambert said she is not opposed to the vote-by-mail idea – “as the ballot gets more and more complicated, people do like to sit at home and fill them out,” she said – but she is opposed to her constituents not having the ability to appease their concerns about whether their vote will actually be counted.
Voting by mail is popular in King County, she said, citing estimates that as many as 70 percent or more voters have chosen to use the mail in recent elections.
But, she said, the system has the potential for fraud and abuse, is costly and fails to address concerns that every voter’s ballot will be counted fairly and accurately.
The lack of a local center will cast an even greater burden on older voters, or voters with accessibility issues, she said.
Lambert stopped short of casting doubt upon the U.S. Post Office’s reliability to deliver everyone’s ballot, but did say she believed not all of her constituents shared in her beliefs in the security of the U.S. mail.
“I think a lot of people are concerned about the security of their ballot,” Lambert said, “and many would like to see their ballot going directly into the machine.”
Lambert said the argument that a fourth drop-site would be too expensive “just doesn’t pass the straight face test.”
Lambert said it would have cost the county about $50,000 to have the fourth location, but in funding the other three, the county was already going well beyond the state requirement of only one centralized voting center.
Staffing and operating just one center, Lambert said, would save the county more than $100,000.
Lambert said when the county was first considering an all-mail voting process, a bipartisan committee had recommended establishing voting centers, where people could still cast their ballot by machines, in each of the county’s nine districts. Because Lambert’s district is so large, the committee even recommended that two of the centers be located in the Valley.
“And I was supportive of that,” she said, adding “we were all in agreement. Then came the budget cuts, and the Democrats said ‘we’re not going to go with the committee recommendations’, and decided to only go with three – all of which are within a close distance of downtown Seattle.”
The central locations, she said, “are too far to expect disabled voters to go from Skykomish or Snoqualmie. Some of the voters in these areas have never voted by mail and want to be able to continue voting in person.”
Under the current system, King County operates 528 polling places, with an election-day polling staff of more than 4,000 workers, at a cost of about $120 per day for each poll worker, Lambert said.
Lambert said she has made numerous requests to elections officials in an attempt to ascertain the actual costs of the vote-by-mail plan, but has yet to receive answers.
“I haven’t seen any data to support the ‘saves money’ concept,” she said.
Under the traditional precinct vote, Lambert said the only associated costs to the county are for voters who actually participate.
“We do send out a sample ballot, but it’s very inexpensive,” she said.
With an all-mail vote, each registered voter must be sent a complete, ready-to-mail ballot. Each ballot, Lambert said, is printed on very heavy paper, in color.
“I have no idea what the printing costs are, but I’d think they’re pretty expensive. Say we’re looking at a 40 percent turnout, which is extremely high,” Lambert said.
“The county will now face the cost of printing 60 percent more ballots, paying the postage to mail them out, sorting them out as they are returned, opening and processing them … it goes on and on,” Lambert said.
“All of that takes time and money, and no matter how many times I’ve asked, no one’s given me an answer as to how much it’s going to cost.”
Lambert said the right to vote is simply too important to take a backseat to a perceived cost savings.
“If we’re going to make our elections accessible, we should do it in a meaningful manner that serves King County’s rural areas as well as the urban core.”
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