The Sacramento County grand jury has become the latest official body to call for all-mail elections. Using estimates supplied by the registrar of voters, the grand jury has concluded that eliminating in-person precinct voting entirely and replacing it with all-mail elections could save the county $1 million per election.
While cost is important, it's not the only or even the most important consideration in the administration of elections. Access, fairness and accuracy are.
Key voting blocks, among them the poor, racial minorities and the young, are less likely to vote by mail. This is the case because they tend to be more mobile or don't use the mail much in their day-to-day lives.
Vote-by-mail systems are also vulnerable to fraud. No one can know for sure who is filling out a mailed-in ballot. Also, mail can be unreliable. Things get lost in the mail, even ballots. When a ballot is mailed to the wrong address, it can't be forwarded. Processing paper ballots is costly and time-consuming.
There may be some value in increasing the use of mail-in balloting and reducing the number of precincts that counties have to set up and staff, especially during low-turnout, off-year elections. But citizens should always have the option of going to some convenient location to vote in person.
Finally, the grand jury's recommendation is based on observations made at 20 percent of the county's precincts during one general election. That is a fairly thin body of information on which to recommend the complete overhaul of our election system.
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