The state would have to pre-pay postage on absentee ballots if a bill introduced this week passes in the legislature. “The postage, while only a small amount, amounts to the poll tax for many of our citizens,” the bill says.
“We should be lowering barriers to voting not raising barriers, especially when it’s a mandatory-mail ballot,” says State representative Bob Hasegawa (D-11), the bill’s prime sponsor. Thirty-eight of Washington’s 39 counties conduct elections exclusively via mail.
Sure, getting a stamp for a ballot seems painless; nonetheless, I agree strongly with Hasegawa. Most people—especially younger voters—don’t have stamps laying around because they use email. Most post offices around Seattle stopped selling stamps individually from vending machines, so folks have to wait in a long line during business hours to visit a teller—an obstacle to voting for the working class.
“If you don’t have the stamp readily available, then the ballot sits on your desk,” Hasegawa says. “Before you know it, you’ve missed the deadline to turn it in.”
But, considering the state’s $6 billion budget deficit, this is a terrible year to pinch from the coffers to raise the price of running elections. For example, the 2008 general election produced a record voter turnout: Of Washington’s 3.6 million registered voters, 3.1 million voted. Multiply that turnout by a 42-cent stamp, and counties would pick up a $1.3 million dollar postage tab—and that’s just the general election. So good idea, but not this year.
UPDATE: Folks in comments are arguing that stamps are for sale at post office vending machines. They added that that if stamps aren’t in vending machines, they’re for sale from a scale at the post office that weighs letters, accepts cash, and spits out stamps. So I, your intrepid servant, investigated.
Fact one: The post office has done away with stamp vending machines. “If you look all over the country, the stamp vending machines are gone,” says David Mattson, a clerk at the Broadway Station post office. “They took them out around six months ago because maintaining them was not cost effective.”
Fact two: At the Broadway post office, the scale doesn’t spit out stamps. Instruction number seven on the sign next to the machine says, “Purchase postage stamps from the stamp machines” (of which there is none).
You can buy single stamps of any denomination from one penny up to at least $20 or so at any post office from the automatic machine.
We’ve had mail in ballots for quite a while down here in Oregon. In addition to being able to mail them in, you can opt to drop them in drop boxes located all over the place. No stamp needed. Gotta love those low tech, no cost solutions.
@ 1) Many post offices stopped selling individual stamps from a machine, Fnarf. You have to see a teller.
Pre-paid stamps for non-profits only run about 4 to 7 cents, not the amount the rest of us pay – my guess is the State would insist on a similar rate.
And Dominic’s right – god it’s been years now.
The record 2008 voter turnout won’t repeat next year (and who knows when it will happen again?). Presidential election years typically have the highest turnout rates, followed by midterm election years. “Off” years like this year have the lowest voter turnout rates. If this passes, the cost will likely end up being a lot less than $1.3 million. It could easily be half of that, or even less.
@3 – Those little kiosks they have at post offices where you weigh packages also work for first class mail. You can walk up to those and buy what amounts to a single, first class stamp.
“What a great idea. Let’s not do it.” pretty much sums up my entire life.
Bought a book of stamps at Safeway this morning. $8.40 for 20. I guess it’s a poll tax of a sort, but it’s probably a wash compared to the time and effort traditional polling takes, even if your polling station is close by.
Really, it’s easy to just drop them at one of the many sites. No postage, no line. And if you work downtown, a lovely excuse for a walk.
If they’re so wired that they only use email you’d think they would want to just order stamps online. Keep digging if you want to find out why young people won’t vote.
@3, @6 is correct. Those kiosks sell postage in any denomination you want. The ones with the scales? You just hit the other button and you can get printed postage in any amount and quantity you want. The resulting sticker is not as pretty as a preprinted stamp, but it works exactly the same.
It is not intuitively obvious that this is so, but if you walk up to one of the machines, you’ll see I’m right. I’m pretty sure every full-sized PO in the country has one now.
Presumably going to all-mail saved the Elections Dept. some big cash. Perhaps they could direct some of that to obvious things like this.
Since I haven’t written long hand in twenty years (thank you computers) I no longer have a legible signature that looks the same way twice.
Which means my ballots don’t get counted, because with all-mail elections, they now hire goons to do signature checks of the ballots.
So I don’t care, stamp or no. Paper ballots in the mail is still 20th century. Wake me up when I can vote over the internet validating my ballot with a PIN.
The closest free election drop box is five miles from my house, compared to my old polling place that was a half mile away. Even the post office is a mile away. Voting by mail is way less convenient than voting in person was. I hate it, and I have no other point here except to whine.
Young people realize that their vote won’t change an election result (blasphemy!). Most of my friends voted last year but don’t bother to vote in off-year elections. Free postage would help.
Does Seattle have drop off points (as mentioned by others) so voters don’t have to use a stamp? If so, isn’t the current situation just a way for rich folk who can afford a 30-whatever cent stamp to be lazy and not walk it there themselves? Wouldn’t that make it so that poor/cheap folk can just walk it there and not worry about it?
I don’t really know all those answers, but this bill is stupid if there are places ballots can be dropped off. If there aren’t, put drop-offs in libraries, SOLVED.
If you think its too far to walk to a drop-off point, perform services on passerbys in the streets so they’ll take it (if you do a good enough job, I guarantee the servicee will get the job done).
The real crime is that homeless citizens don’t have houses or mailboxes (… am I right?) in order to get these damned things in the mail. Mailboxes for po’ folk should be free, and that should be on the damned bill.
Great article, Dominic. This is an interesting subject, and we’re following it pretty closely. Just to clear things up, there definitely are drop boxes in Washington, just check your county elections website and you can find them.
Dear Journalist:
Step away from the math. Put down your calculator and STEP AWAY FROM THE MATH. And if there’s a currency symbol involved, you might be tasered.
Golob, can you help with this one? Thanks!
Now, back to foie gras, transit, and condos.
Thank you.
So instead we’d have a $6.0013 billion budget deficit? Big deal. This should be passed.
okay first off washington has 39 COUNTIES, NOT 42. and now pierce county is the only remaining county in the state with polling places, making it 38 out of 39 counties that are all now vote-by-mail.
secondly – i worked in the king county elections department phone bank leading up to and during the general election of ’06 – and i will NEVER AGAIN trust the USPS with my ballot – i spoke to too many people who never received their first absentee ballot (and i could look up and see when their ballot had been created and sent out) so if the USPS can’t even get a ballot TO so many people, i really doubt their ability to get my voted ballot back to where it can be tabulated. i always encourage everyone i know to use a ballot drop box – take a few (or more) pairs of hands out of the process.
@16 – for the election at the beginning of this month there were ten 24-hour drop boxes available throughout the county, not including the 3 “automated voting centers” which also had drop boxes available – out of those 13, 4 of those locations were in seattle – one in the u-district, one in delridge, one at the king county admin building, and one at union station (the latter being the automated voting center) – and yes there should definitely be more of these boxes, IMHO (i live in the NW corner of the city and yes i made the harrowing trek *all the way to the u district* and survived – even took a friend’s ballot too – carpool!)
@13 – even if you went in to a polling place you would HAVE TO SIGN IN A POLL BOOK. and guess what??? THOSE SIGNATURES GET CHECKED TOO! and if you follow the directions that are mailed to you in a letter (and oftentimes people whose signatures raise a challenge get a phonecall too – i had to speak to a bunch of you folks a couple years ago – you would have thought i was satan the way some of you launched into me, a temp, just doing my job and TRYING TO LET YOU KNOW HOW TO GET YOUR G-D VOTE COUNTED) then you would know that there are simple ways to rectify the signature challenge, either by mail or in person.
if you all want more drop boxes then you should LET YOUR COUNTY COUNCILMEMBER KNOW….they’re the ones who dictate how a lot of things are done within the elections department – need to know who to get in touch with? go to http://www.kingcounty.gov/council/counci… and find who represents you in the KCC.
No, no, no, guys – To anyone who thinks you can just go to one of those automated postage machines and buy a single stamp, go try it out “in r/l” and let us know how it went.
I’ve tried this myself recently (at the West Seattle p.o.) and the instructions on the screen said first that there was a $1 minimum charge, so would I like to buy 3 of the 42-cent “stamps”? I pushed yes and it spit out 3 metered (and DATED) postage strips, not stamps.
So then I had to wait in line anyway to ask a clerk what I could do about the extra 2 “stamps” I was forced to buy by the machine and she told me if I found a couple other letters to mail that I “should be able to use them tomorrow”.
So, while I generally have lots of stamps on hand myself, I do think it would be better to just have the absentee ballots’ postage prepaid, because it is actually more of a hassle than it seems to go buy a single stamp at the post office.
I didn’t know about the dollar limit. That’s probably because it hits your debit card. But those postage strips ARE stamps. That’s what stamps are.
I come down on the the free postage side.
Laid-Off Elections Worker for the win.
You want it to change, you talk to the right people, whiny twats. (My obligatory dickish post of the day)
OK, this is really a non-issue, but the more I’ve been thinking about it the more it bothers me. If you can’t be bothered to track down a motherfucking stamp, maybe you shouldn’t be voting.
When you stop and think about how often even getting out of bed is a challenge for elderly people, yet they vote in great numbers, you realize that these imagined “barriers” are not why young single people don’t vote. It’s more to do with outgrowing the narcissism of youth than any minor imagined inconvenience like a stamp or — LOL! — a signature.
If you can get your ass out of the house to go to a Post Office to get a stamp, you can make it to one of the drop off locations. Also, the cutoff should be *arrival* by election day, not *postmarked* by election day.
I like the idea of mandatory voting, like Australia, with $500 fines if you don’t.
Though I have had my ballot rejected for non-matching signature before. Pain in the ass — I had to photocopy a bunch of ID documents, fill out a form and stuff. No idea whether it was successfully counted in the end. I blame Dino Rossi.
I can name at least one post office that doesn’t have the scale/postage dispenser you all keep talking about – mine.
And yeah, I’m enough of a Jeffersonian to believe that if you can’t manage to come up with a stamp, you probably don’t give a shit enough to be allowed to vote in the first place.
I agree with #10. USPS sells stamps online. You don’t even have to leave your house to not have to leave your house to vote.
FNARF is so wrong.
My post office has a plastic-only machine to weigh packages & buy per-item postage as well as stamps. It’s useful after business hours & on Sundays (& maybe soon on Saturdays). What the L A area seems to have done is lay off letter carriers and have only one daily delivery instead of a separate one for priority mail. Local neighborhood mail boxes were removed around 3 years ago.
thanks for correcting the # of counties that washington state has – but again, i will repeat (complete with link to the WASHINGTON SECRETARY OF STATE’S WEBSITE THIS TIME) that ONLY ONE COUNTY in our state still has polling locations – please change your erroneous information about 34 counties:
http://wei.secstate.wa.gov/osos/en/voter…
from that page:
“Which counties vote by mail?
38 of Washington’s 39 counties vote by mail. Pierce County still maintains poll sites. “
sheesh indeed leave the math to the science guy…unless yall need to hire a fact checker….i’m available.
So, rather than paying for the stamp “tax” individually to mail our ballot like responsible citizens, we should pay a tax collectively to mail everyone’s ballot.
Okay…let’s follow that logic down the trail a bit…
Marking the ballot requires a black, ink pen. So, why should we have to pay the black, ink pen “tax” individually? Shouldn’t mommy and daddy government buy us a pen?
Folding the ballot correctly and inserting into multiple envelopes is such a strain, and it may result in paper cuts. So, why should we incur a paper folding “tax”? Shouldn’t mom and pop government pay to fold and insert for us, or provide health care coverage for the muscle strain and paper cuts?
Sealing the envelope is the equivalent of a licking “tax.” Shouldn’t mum and dad government pay for self-sealing envelopes?
Mailing the ballot requires walking or driving to the nearest mailbox or post office. It’s the equivalent of a mobility “tax.” Shouldn’t mama and papa government pay to pick up our ballot at the door?
Checking online to verify receipt of your returned ballot requires a computer, which, of course, is a computer “tax.” Shouldn’t mater and pater familias government pay for everyone to have a computer?
Where exactly should your responsibility for you, your ballot and your vote begin?
If you won’t be bothered to buy a stamp to mail your ballot, you deserve the government elected by those who will. Enjoy.
#8: 20 stamps cost $8.40 (42 cents each), Safeway does not add anything extra to the price of a book of stamps. I also buy stamps at Fred Meyer and other grocery stores. You just ask the cashier for a book of stamps and make sure they hand them over, it’s amazing how often they forget and I have to remind them I also need the stamps.
# 33) Thanks, eagle eye. Fixed. I was looking at an outdated report on the number of counties that do mail-only elections.
@dom – you’re welcome, cutie.