Pa. to consider vote-by-mail ballot system to increase turnout

5/30/2007, 4:58 p.m. EDT
By MARK SCOLFORO
The Associated Press

HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) — Adopting a mail-in voting system could improve Pennsylvania's anemic voter turnout, the chairwoman of the House State Government Committee said Wednesday.

Rep. Babette Josephs, D-Philadelphia, said she will summon witnesses for hearings on the subject in the coming months.

"It's a long-term project," Josephs said. "I don't expect we're going to have universal mail-in voting at the end of this session, and I don't have any time frame for it except that I want it to happen and I want to start the conversation."

About half the states, including Pennsylvania, do not allow no-excuse absentee voting. Here, the state constitution allows absentee votes by people serving in the military, those who will be out of town or have a religious conflict on election day, those who are too ill or disabled to go to a polling place and people who must vote ahead of time because of election duties.

Oregon, which began voting by mail in statewide elections in 1993, boasted the nation's third-highest turnout during the 2004 presidential race, according to a Census Bureau report issued two months ago. Only Minnesota and Wisconsin, which allow voters to register on election day, had higher rates.

"Everybody always says, 'We're going to change the type of voting in order to improve turnout,'" said Doug Lewis with the Elections Center in Houston. "So far, vote-by-mail's the only one that's actually done that."

Other "convenience voting" methods that states have adopted or considered are early voting — which allows voters to cast ballots before election day — and voting centers, where people can vote anywhere in a county, not just at their home precinct.

Pennsylvania's voter turnout for presidential races is about the national average. It has for several decades hovered in or near the low 50s as a percentage of voting-age population, according to a Franklin & Marshall College study.

Gov. Ed Rendell's Election Reform Task Force in 2005 recommended against a system such as Oregon's. It concluded the mail-in system could not be adopted without extensive study and noted the communal value of traditional voting.

The task force, however, said Pennsylvania's absentee voting rules are too restrictive and should be relaxed.
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