Herhold: One vote against mail elections

By Scott Herhold   San Jose Mercury    19 May 2005

Call me a curmudgeon. Go ahead. You'd certainly be accurate. On the issue of voting by mail, I'm a throwback to another time, a believer in the quaint process of trekking down to the polling place and signing in to cast a ballot.

I know it's a losing cause. Just as cell phones have taken parents out of the social loop of their kids, voting by mail or the Internet eventually will supplant the elderly volunteers who run the voting places. Oregon already does all elections by mail.

The topic has fresh meaning today because a bill sponsored by Assemblywoman Carol Liu, D-Pasadena, would allow San Mateo, Santa Cruz and five other counties to vote mostly by mail through 2010.

Though Santa Clara County has not joined Liu's conga line it does, after all, have an investment in 5,500 Sequoia touch screen voting machines vote-by-mail is happening on a smaller scale here, too. It was used to pass a county library tax earlier this year.

Through the absentee system, voting by mail is already deeply entrenched in California. No longer required to state a reason for obtaining an absentee ballot, 34.1 percent of voters used mail ballots in California's March 2004 primary.

Convenience

The polls show that people like the service. And the elections are cheaper. Sooner or later, voting will be as easy as checking your 401(k) online. So what's my problem? Why don't I just accept the change and get on with life? Why fight it?

There are a few reasons. First, it makes sense for everyone to be voting on the basis of the same information. If you cast your ballot 30 days before the election, you'll miss late-breaking information that could change your mind.

In a debate sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute last fall, Curtis Gans, a well-known elections expert, cited the classic case: A few days before the 1992 election, Ross Perot accused the Bush White House of sabotaging his daughter's wedding. Anyone voting 30 days ahead would not have gotten the full view of Perot's paranoia.

A second reason is that voting by mail subtly changes the secrecy of the process. Your poker buddies, or even your spouse, may want to sit down with you and compare ballots. Bad idea. I've always cherished my moments of caprice voting no on an appellate judge I don't know, say when I pull the curtain. I don't want to share them with my wife.

Beyond all that, voting is one of the last communal acts we have as Americans. Yes, it's individual. Yes, it's a secret ballot. But there's something about the communal act of signing in and standing in line that reinforces our common responsibility. It's something I take my kids to so that the ritual can teach them what democracy means.

Polling passion

I live in a liberal precinct, the Shasta-Hanchett Park neighborhood of San Jose. Last November, the line outside the Westminster Presbyterian Church stretched down the block at 7 a.m., testimony to the precinct's eagerness to evict George W. Bush from office over Iraq.

You don't have to share those politics to understand the passion: This wasn't a bloodless exercise at home, like filling out a mail order form from LL Bean and getting a fleece. This mattered. It was something people did together. A mail ballot can never do that. It's one more retreat into our separate worlds, behind our walls of convenience and call-recognition.

P.S. While I'm on the topic of honoring tradition, a group of retired county employees is pushing the notion of renaming the Santa Clara County government center at 70 W. Hedding St the famed Rusty Bucket after ex-county executive Howard Campen, who died in March. It's an idea worth considering. Campen left a huge mark as county executive from 1957 to 1976.

In any case, his boosters had the sense to wait until after he was dead to make the suggestion, breaking with the rush to name our landmarks the airport, the train station after the fallible living.