Jason Grotelueschen

“Who gives you power?
Where do you think it all comes from?
I give you power over me
But I gotta be free
And now I say
I can take it away (watch me)“
— I Give You Power – Arcade Fire & Mavis Staples 

Like many Americans, I’ve got ballots on the brain.

Over the weekend, during a sunny walk around my West Seattle neighborhood, I dropped off my August primary ballot at a local King County ballot box.  No “I Voted” sticker (although those are certainly available), but regardless, it always feels good, even if a primary is just a run-up to the “main event” elections in November. All part of the process.

I had essentially filled out my ballot at home, in my pajamas, like a boss. This is nothing new in Washington State, which has been successfully all mail-in for almost two decades (and recently went stamp-free, even), but the approach is getting renewed attention nationwide as the impacts of COVID-19 continue. There have been numerous recent articles and interviews with Washington’s secretary of state (Kim Wyman, an elected Republican in a blue-in-the-west and red-on-the-east state, and who happens to be up for election herself this fall), in which she touts the high-popularity and low-fraud track record of mail-in voting in Washington and in other states doing the same thing. 

I’ll write more below about the weird stigma of “mailing it in,” but to me, the important thing is to take care of the easy part, which you have full control over. Vote. Get the pen and fill the oval and just make it happen. You’ve got the power.

I fully admit that I unapologetically fall into the “if you don’t vote, you can’t complain” camp. The right to vote is something that our country’s founders sacrificed so much for, and any modern-cries of “my vote doesn’t count” or “the candidates are all the same” just don’t resonate with me, especially for local/county/state elections in which public engagement tends to be woefully lacking. As consumers have moved away from supporting local independent media and toward national corporate media funded by special interests, people are increasingly obsessed with federal happenings and “cult of personality” figures, but shockingly clueless when it comes to their own city/county/state elected officials and the issues within their jurisdiction that actually matter. The exceptions, of course, are those occasions in which local officials/events get national attention (usually negative, for a social media comment or wayward tweet), and then suddenly those citizens who previously couldn’t name their own local officials try to hold court as armchair experts on “how things are in my city.” Spare me. Public service at a local level is a crucial and often thankless job (and yes, too many local races go uncontested and too many local decision-making meetings are sparsely attended, which is another subject for another day), but using our votes to engage is a basic step.

Voting is crucial. Do it. The national sentiment to exercise those rights has boiled even stronger this past week with the passing of Rep. John Lewis, a true pioneer of voting rights who sacrificed more than most of us can possibly imagine to stand up for what he believed in. The least we can do to honor the legacies of those who came before us is to put in some research and cast our votes. In a couple of my prior posts, I wrote about my own attempts to get out of my comfort zone, listen, learn and then (ultimately) get involved in areas where I felt like I could help. For every American, voting is the most bottom-line manifestation of the latter — taking what you’ve internalized and then committing to support the leaders/measures that you think best align with what you think should come next.

What I don’t align with, though, is the notion that the voting process itself must be conducted/gathered in a certain romanticized way, especially when that “way” has a history of discouraging and disenfranchising voters with long lines or arbitrary polling place shutdowns or time windows that are nearly impossible for working-class people to meet. Pretending that our country’s current/prior methods of registration and voting are more pure and “patriotic” than modern attempts to improve access and accuracy isn’t helpful. However, combining “the old with the new” in haphazard ways without a clear plan is usually a recipe for disaster. (Iowa caucuses, anyone?) Could a national holiday for Election Day help with voter engagement? Perhaps.

At an earlier stage of my career, I helped work on designing secure digital voting software/terminals, and was able to see the inner workings of the process (both technically and politically). I came away from that experience not frightened or concerned about fraud, but with a strong realization that while no system is perfect, it would be irresponsible for us an a society not to explore using new tools and technologies at our disposal to make it easier for more citizens to A) register to vote, and B) actually vote.   

In my own journey as a voter, I’ve been fortunate to have very few hurdles and absolutely no excuses.

I was one month too young to vote in the 1992 presidential election (Bill Clinton’s first term), but I cast my first ballot in 1994 as a sophomore in college, just shy of my 20^th birthday, in which I voted for (among other things) Democrat Ben Nelson as governor of Nebraska (he won). I was then able to vote in 1996 for Clinton’s second term, in 1998 for Ben Nelson’s replacement (Republican Mike Johanns, who also won), and in every election since then as a resident of Nebraska or Washington at various times.  

Political parties have never been my thing. I’ve been a registered independent (lowercase “i,” as opposed to various “capital I” parties that have sometimes caused confusion in states like Connecticut and California) for my entire 26 years of voting age. In most of the places I’ve lived, being “independent” actually means registering as “unaffiliated,” which I admit seems a bit generic and noncommittal, but as a political centrist that’s where I’ve gravitated, and ultimately it’s the vote that counts. It’s always interesting to me to see which items/offices on ballots are considered partisan (with the candidate’s listed party preference) and which ones aren’t. It seems random, but has a huge impact. As much as I wish that there weren’t a significant number of voters who just “go in cold” and look for the D’s and R’s, regardless of the quality of candidate, we know that the data/trends tell a different story. These dynamics have been historically interesting in my native Nebraska, well-known for its one-house Unicameral, its splitting of electoral votes since 1992 (Maine has done it since 1972) allowing for “purple state” outcomes, and the prairie populism of figures like William Jennings Bryan and Chuck Hagel.

In certain caucuses and primaries, it’s often a requirement for a voter to choose a “prefers X party” ballot in order to vote, in which case I just grin and bear it. There’s nothing sacred or binding about those “preferences” anyway, and primary voters hop back and forth all the time for what they view as larger strategic political gamesmanship. Those party selections don’t matter.

When I lived in the Midwest, I usually voted in-person at a volunteer-staffed polling place (usually a school or church or weird “community party room” at a local apartment complex), but on several occasions I requested and used an absentee ballot to vote, when I knew I’d be traveling or frankly just didn’t want to deal with having to juggle schedules on Election Day. Shortly after we moved to Washington State in the early 2000s, the state began making the pivot toward mail-in voting. It was initially presented as an opt-in program to the counties, and it was overwhelmingly popular, and it’s been standard ever since. Other states such as Oregon, Utah, Colorado and Hawaii also use mail-in voting almost exclusively, and every state in the U.S. gives voters an option to request an absentee ballot. The Pew Research Center says that nearly a quarter (21%) of the 2016 presidential election ballots were mail-in, up from only 8% in 1996, and this year the percentage will of course be considerably higher given societal trends and (especially) COVID.

I have watched the national “debate” about mail-in voting with half-amusement and half-exasperation. I don’t mind using “air quotes” in this situation because it really isn’t much of a debate or discussion, it’s just lobbing platitudes around about how “real Americans” should supposedly approach the idea of voting if they truly love this country. I know there are many people who are committed to the notion of “traditional” polling places, even though the shortcomings of that model (especially in underserved urban centers) are well-documented.

There is also a strange hair-splitting argument circulating that says “absentee ballots are fine, but mail-in ballots are not.” Not only does this ring hollow as a supposed “defense” for one’s own voting history, but more importantly, it doesn’t make any functional sense. The absentee/mail-in processes are identical, the only difference is that absentee ballots are opt-in and must be requested, whereas a fully mail-in election is mandated by the state legislature and becomes the sole means by which ballots are collected and counted. As a voter, you still have to sign your ballot/affidavit when you send it in, and it gets checked while counting, just like a volunteer or staffer at a polling place would do. Reports of people receiving voter-registration applications in the mail for children or dead relatives aren’t evidence of any sort of “fraud,” either, it’s just an indication that records are out-of-date or inaccurate. It happens. Now, if you were to actually try to “make a point” by taking one of those applications sent to you erroneously, filling it out, getting a ballot and using/signing it, then at that point, congratulations — YOU have committed voter fraud. So good luck with that.

Should we be concerned about potential issues with our country’s mail-in process needing to scale up so quickly per-state this fall? From a logistical perspective, yes, those are valid concerns, and indeed most knowledgeable observers predict that the typical flurry of “Election Night winners” and “projected victors” is very unlikely to happen in 2020 — the process of counting and determining local totals, which then roll up to larger totals, could take weeks. But with COVID looming large, the alternative of trying to do it “the old fashioned” way just isn’t viable, and would result in hopelessly skewed electoral results in which the only votes cast are from those willing to ignore health guidelines and gather somewhere to vote as opposed to doing the same thing at home.

While concerns of scale are certainly valid (as a tech guy, I deal with taking good ideas and trying to make them work “at scale” every day), concerns about “voter fraud” simply are not. Reports of “widespread fraud” have turned out to be nothing more than attempts to take small anecdotal irregularities and extrapolate them across a nationwide swath of voters. There has been no evidence of measurable voter fraud in any U.S. state or county (the most high-level “fraud-finding” effort in the country unceremoniously shut itself down two years ago after not finding anything), and no evidence that mail-in voting would increase the frequency of the few cases that have been found. Many of the hard-core opponents of mail-in voting have obvious political reasons for not wanting to make it easier for voters in certain districts to cast their ballots. In 2020, we’re likely to see some trend-bucking election results in many districts, which some pundits will attempt to brand as “evidence of fraud,” when in reality it’s “evidence of more registered voters actually being able to…well, y’know…vote.”

Buckle up. It’s going to be a wild election season (it already is). I’m here for it, one oval at a time. Are you?