A stamp shouldn’t be necessary to vote: Let’s keep ballot return envelopes postage-free

This year, Wash­ing­ton State took an impor­tant step towards low­er­ing bar­ri­ers to vot­ing by mak­ing all bal­lot return envelopes postage free. This move effec­tive­ly elim­i­nat­ed what had been akin to a poll tax. Every post office effec­tive­ly became a bal­lot drop box, with vot­ers every­where gain­ing the free­dom to return a bal­lot through the Unit­ed States Postal Ser­vice with­out need­ing to wor­ry about stamps.

Sad­ly, instead of cel­e­brat­ing the removal of a bar­ri­er to vot­ing, Repub­li­can Sec­re­tary of State Kim Wyman today sug­gest­ed that maybe it was­n’t worth it in a real­ly bad sto­ry pub­lished by MYNorthwest.com, the online hub for Bon­neville Inter­na­tion­al’s Seat­tle radio sta­tions KTTH 770 AM, KIRO 710 AM, and KIRO 97.3 FM.

The flawed premise of the sto­ry, authored by reporter Mike Lewis, is basi­cal­ly as fol­lows: Over­all vot­er turnout in the 2018 midterms isn’t going to end up high­er than 2010 turnout, so that means Wyman and Gov­er­nor Inslee’s move to pro­vide pre­paid postage on all bal­lot return envelopes was — and I quote! — a “bust”.

Wrong! Pro­vid­ing pre­paid postage on bal­lot return envelopes was a respon­si­ble, appro­pri­ate, and inclu­sive vot­ing reform. It was worth doing regard­less of whether it bol­stered turnout across the board or not. It’s a reform that we absolute­ly must make per­ma­nent, even if Kim Wyman isn’t on board.

And it does­n’t sound like she is.

Wyman said the sta­t­ic vot­er turnout num­bers indi­cate that the Leg­is­la­ture might not be warm to fund­ing gov­ern­ment-paid postage mov­ing ahead.

“I think if we had seen stronger vot­er turnout, I’d be a stronger advo­cate (for con­tin­ued state bal­lot-postage fund­ing),” Wyman said.

“Was it nice for the state to do this for vot­ers? Sure it was,” she added.

But she got an ear­ful from both the peo­ple who sup­port­ed the effort and those who saw it as a waste of tax­pay­er money.

The larg­er point that law­mak­ers should deal with, she said, is that the state does not ade­quate­ly cov­er the cost of the elec­tions it requires the coun­ties to hold.

We are all in favor of pro­vid­ing coun­ties with more fund­ing to cov­er the costs of elec­tions. Few peo­ple know that the state has an arrange­ment with the coun­ties to reim­burse them for costs asso­ci­at­ed with statewide bal­lot mea­sures and state-lev­el con­tests in odd-num­bered years, but not in even-num­bered years. That makes no sense. The coun­ties should get reim­bursed for the state’s share every year.

By all means, let’s have that impor­tant con­ver­sa­tion about elec­tions costs. It will do us good: Elec­tions are a pub­lic ser­vice, after all. But pre­paid postage on bal­lot return envelopes has to become manda­to­ry and per­ma­nent­ly fund­ed by the state.

If we’re going to be seri­ous about low­er­ing bar­ri­ers to vot­ing — and we should be — then pre­paid postage on bal­lot return envelopes can­not be up for debate. It has to stay. This was first and fore­most a vot­ing reform, as opposed to an exper­i­ment to bol­ster midterm elec­tion turnout (which is what Kim Wyman seems to think it is).

We can eas­i­ly afford to con­tin­ue mak­ing it pos­si­ble to return a bal­lot through the post with­out a stamp. Any­one con­cerned about stream­lin­ing elec­tions and sav­ing mon­ey is wel­come to join NPI in call­ing for an end to the Feb­ru­ary and April spe­cial elec­tion win­dows and replac­ing them with a sched­ule that ordi­nar­i­ly has only two elec­tions per year: one in May or June, and one in November.

(A pres­i­den­tial pri­ma­ry could also be held sep­a­rate­ly from those two elec­tions in years divis­i­ble by four, ide­al­ly on a date in March.)

Now, with regards to the effect that pre­paid postage had on vot­er turnout this year, here are some impor­tant points to con­sid­er that did­n’t make it into Mike Lewis’ sto­ry and the incred­i­bly dis­ap­point­ing com­men­tary from Kim Wyman it contains.

Let me begin by offer­ing some con­text on vot­er turnout.

It’s impor­tant to under­stand that since Wyman took office in Jan­u­ary 2013, vot­er turnout in every type of elec­tion — and Wash­ing­ton reg­u­lar­ly holds nine dif­fer­ent types, not count­ing Feb­ru­ary or April spe­cial elec­tions — had been declin­ing.

Last year, in fact, Wash­ing­ton set a record for the worst-ever gen­er­al elec­tion turnout in state his­to­ry, only two years after the last such record had been set.

Wyman did­n’t cause this declin­ing turnout, but she has cer­tain­ly known about the prob­lem for a long time, and she has failed to do any­thing to address it. We called on her repeat­ed­ly to lead on remov­ing bar­ri­ers to vot­ing. But she didn’t.

This year, with the State Sen­ate back in Demo­c­ra­t­ic hands, the era of inac­tion on knock­ing down vot­ing bar­ri­ers final­ly came to an end.

At Gov­er­nor Inslee’s urg­ing, the Leg­is­la­ture passed the ground­break­ing Access to Democ­ra­cy pack­age, cham­pi­oned by Demo­c­ra­t­ic leg­is­la­tors like Sam Hunt, Zack Hud­gins, Pat­ty Kud­er­er, Rebec­ca Sal­dana, Lau­rie Dolan, and Steve Bergquist.

As a con­se­quence, we’re now get­ting same-day vot­er reg­is­tra­tion, auto­mat­ic vot­er reg­is­tra­tion, and youth pre­reg­is­tra­tion, plus the Wash­ing­ton Vot­ing Rights Act.

Then, after the leg­isla­tive ses­sion end­ed, King Coun­ty announced it would pro­vide pre­paid postage on bal­lot return envelopes for all its voters.

Not want­i­ng Wash­ing­to­ni­ans out­side of King Coun­ty to be left out, Wyman and Inslee cob­bled togeth­er funds from their own office bud­gets to ensure the oth­er thir­ty-eight coun­ties could copy King Coun­ty’s move at no addi­tion­al cost.

Each of the elec­tions we have now held with pre­paid postage on bal­lot return envelopes have bucked the declin­ing turnout trend we’ve been mired in.

In August, we saw statewide vot­er turnout of 40.79%, the high­est in years — high­er even than turnout in the 2016 Top Two, which was a pres­i­den­tial year and thus not direct­ly com­pa­ra­ble. And in this Novem­ber 2018 gen­er­al elec­tion, we’re cur­rent­ly see­ing vot­er turnout of 71.09% statewide, with a few bal­lots still to count. That’s a huge increase over the 2014 midterms, when turnout was only 54.16%.

Wyman has long argued that turnout is a func­tion of what’s on the bal­lot, and she stub­born­ly believes this to be true, even though it’s actu­al­ly just one fac­tor that influ­ences turnout. Accord­ing­ly, she is mea­sur­ing 2018 turnout against 2010 turnout, because 2010 is last midterm elec­tion we had with a Unit­ed States Sen­ate race near the top of the bal­lot. 2014 is appar­ent­ly irrel­e­vant and meaningless.

Wyman’s analy­sis is flawed in mul­ti­ple respects.

First, if we’re going to make com­par­isons, we may as well com­pare 2018 with 2014, since 2014 was the most recent midterm. No two elec­tions are exact­ly alike. Any com­par­i­son we wish to make will be flawed to some extent.

Com­pared to 2014, 2018 turnout is a giant improvement.

Sec­ond, while 2014 may not have had a U.S. Sen­ate race, it did have three ini­tia­tives (I‑591, I‑594, I‑1351), a few State Supreme Court races, and ten U.S. House con­tests. I‑591 and I‑594 con­cerned gun safe­ty, a con­tentious issue.

Third, our 2018 U.S. Sen­ate race was not com­pet­i­tive, where­as the 2010 U.S. Sen­ate race was. By Wyman’s log­ic, that makes this year’s turnout more impressive.

Unlike in 2010, when Dino Rossi’s can­di­da­cy was con­sid­ered to be a real threat to Pat­ty Mur­ray’s reelec­tion, Maria Cantwell was nev­er con­sid­ered to be in dan­ger of los­ing. The state Repub­li­can Par­ty did not even pro­duce a can­di­date it want­ed to stand behind (Susan Hutchi­son) until a few min­utes before the end of filing.

Fourth, the uni­verse of vot­ers has expand­ed sig­nif­i­cant­ly since 2010. Eight years ago, accord­ing to state data, there were 3,601,268 vot­ers reg­is­tered. Now there are 4,362,014. Because our vot­ing rolls have grown, more peo­ple have to vote in order for us to equal or sur­pass the record or high per­cent­ages we set in the past.

Fifth, 2018 turnout may not end up high­er than 2010 turnout, but this ban­ner year fol­lows a long peri­od of declin­ing vot­er turnout across all kinds of elec­tions, where­as 2010 fol­lowed 2008, a cycle in which we set an all-time vot­er turnout record.

Sixth, 2018 stacks up incred­i­bly well against every oth­er midterm elec­tion in mod­ern times, per­cent­age-wise. Since our elec­toral his­to­ry did­n’t begin in 2010, why lim­it our­selves to com­par­ing 2018 to that cycle? Let’s com­pare 2018 to even more midterms — includ­ing midterms with a U.S. Sen­ate race.

Midterm Vot­er Turnout, Last Thir­ty Years

• 2018: 71.09% Novem­ber turnout (so far)
• 2014: 54.16% Novem­ber turnout (no U.S. Sen­ate race)
• 2010: 71.24% Novem­ber turnout (Pat­ty Mur­ray vs. Dino Rossi)
• 2006: 64.55% Novem­ber turnout (Maria Cantwell vs. Mike McGavick)
• 2002: 56.35% Novem­ber turnout (no U.S. Sen­ate race)
• 1998: 62.17% Novem­ber turnout (Pat­ty Mur­ray vs. Lin­da Smith)
• 1994: 59.85% Novem­ber turnout (Slade Gor­ton vs. Ron Sims)
• 1990: 61.24% Novem­ber turnout (no U.S. Sen­ate race)

As we can see, our cur­rent turnout is quite a bit high­er than every midterm held dur­ing the last thir­ty years except 2010. 2010 was the big out­lier… until now.

2010 was a very dis­tinc­tive elec­tion in many ways. For exam­ple, there were an extra large num­ber of bal­lot mea­sures (nine total), there was that tight U.S. Sen­ate race that attract­ed the atten­tion of the Pres­i­dent of the Unit­ed States, and King Coun­ty joined near­ly every oth­er coun­ty in adopt­ing vot­ing at home as opposed to a hybrid sys­tem of polling places for in-per­son vot­ing plus “absen­tee” voting.

If we aver­age all midterms going back to 1990 togeth­er, we get 62.58%. Our cur­rent statewide turnout com­pares very favor­ably to that average.

A few weeks ago, when I inter­viewed King Coun­ty Elec­tions Direc­tor Julie Wise, I asked her if pre­paid postage on bal­lot return envelopes had made a dif­fer­ence in the August Top Two elec­tion. And she said it had. Here’s our exchange:

NPI’s ANDREW VILLENEUVE: Hi, Julie. Last time we talked, King Coun­ty Elec­tions had just announced pre­paid postage [on bal­lot return envelopes], and we’ve [now] had a first elec­tion with that.

What were the results? Was it a success?

JULIE WISE: Yeah, it was a great suc­cess! We saw approx­i­mate­ly four to five per­cent increase in turnout in the [Top Two] elec­tion that I real­ly attribute to pre­paid postage. I real­ly don’t see any sort of oth­er issues on a [Top Two] bal­lot that would lead vot­ers to have vot­ed in a high­er per­cent­age, or turned out in a high­er percentage.

So it was a great success.

And we also saw that vot­ers’ behav­ior changed.

Where [pre­vi­ous­ly] fifty per­cent of vot­ers were return­ing bal­lots through a drop box and [fifty per­cent] through the Unit­ed States Postal Ser­vice, [we saw] sev­en­ty per­cent of vot­ers return­ing [their bal­lots] through the Unit­ed States Postal Ser­vice instead.

So that, and, we didn’t see any issues through the Unit­ed States Postal Ser­vice. USPS did an awe­some job of mak­ing sure that we received bal­lots with­out any delay, and there were no issues.

So, to me, that’s a win.

When we look at King Coun­ty’s cur­rent turnout ver­sus its 2010 gen­er­al elec­tion turnout, we can see a bump. Eight years ago it was 71.65%, and now it’s 74.6%, with bal­lots still to be count­ed. That’s def­i­nite­ly an improvement.

Exact­ly how much did pre­paid postage on bal­lot return envelopes help King Coun­ty reach that impres­sive mark? We can’t know for sure.

But Elec­tions Direc­tor Julie Wise cer­tain­ly believes that lib­er­at­ing vot­ers from need­ing a stamp to return a bal­lot has a pos­i­tive effect on turnout.

And she is much clos­er to the action, so to speak, than Sec­re­tary Wyman.

We can com­pare data points till the cows come home, and argue to what extent vot­ing reforms affect turnout. But we all ought to be able to agree that vot­ing should­n’t be dif­fi­cult and bur­den­some. Peo­ple should not have to jump through hoops — like acquir­ing a stamp — in order to par­tic­i­pate. It its there­fore imper­a­tive we con­tin­ue to pro­vide pre­paid postage on bal­lot return envelopes.