The More Things Change …. — By Tommy Purser

This week, I was looking at some old issues of the Ledger. The issues were 30 years old, printed in 1996.
Three decades ago, a bill was introduced in the Georgia Legislature about which I saw fit to pen a column. The bill was introduced to see if members of the Legislature wanted to learn about mail-in voting and to try a little test run to see if maybe, just maybe, mail-in voting could work in Georgia.
Mind you, this 30 years before Donald Trump and his supporters began declaring that the 2020 election was rigged and that mail-in voting was a scam. Re-reading that column made me realize the truth of that old saying, “The more things change, the more they stay the same.”
The bill in question was House Bill 1669, which would allow for a pilot project to test whether or not conducting elections by mail is a workable proposal in Georgia.
Part of what I said in that column 30 years ago was, “ —
Some time back, when I first heard of the proposal, my first reaction was the same, knee-jerk reaction Charles Tyson, chairman of the board of the South Georgia Chamber of Commerce, had: “voting by mail could be subject to widespread fraud.”
But that was before I heard both sides of the argument. Now I think Georgia legislators should give the bill serious consideration. After all, it’s merely a pilot project, not a wholesale change of our election system.
There are a number of strong reasons for favoring the vote-by-mail proposal. One of the strongest, I think, is the fact that it will lead to a more informed electorate because citizens will have time to study the issues.
Think about it: how many times have you walked into a voting booth and flipped a lever on a race you knew very little, if anything at all, about? If voters could receive their ballots in the mail, they would have time to seek out information on the various candidates, referendums, etc., in the election.
Voting by mail will also remove scheduling barriers. People won’t have to leave work, for instance, to vote. And they won’t have to stand in long lines.
What about the “widespread fraud” concern? No more of a problem than it already is. Every voter’s signature would be checked against the voter registration card. And there is more time available to check irregularities when election officials are not limited to working on a single election day.
Speaking of election officials, with ballots verified and counted atna central location, far less workers will be needed, resulting in substantial savings to the taxpayer.
And the citizens of Oregon, a state with 1.811 million voters — comparable to Georgia — proved it could work. In a Dec. 5 special primary election to fill that state’s vacant U.S. Senate seat; participation was 65.8%, a new record for the highest turnout in a special election in Oregon in the 20th century. Special elections in Georgia generally draw less than half that percentage of voters.
In testifying before a Congressional committee studying election processes and reform, the Oregon elections manager said:
“The history of Oregon’s (vote-by-mail) law was that it went through six years of revisions before it became a permanent part of election law. During that time the process held up under objections that said: ‘There will be widespread fraud, undue influence and lack of secrecy,’ ‘The school boards should be able to decide how their elections should be conducted,’ ‘If more people vote you will have a less informed vote,’ ‘We will never pass a measure if all of these people vote,’ and ‘Requiring the voter to pay return postage is the same as a poll tax.’ In fact, all of these were red herrings raised by people who wanted to maintain the status quo because the existing system was less open and therefore easier to manipulate.