Growing Absentee Voting Is Reshaping Campaigns

New York Times
Last Updated:October 22. 2006 12:00AM
Published: October 22. 2006 5:49AM



WASHINGTON, Oct. 21 For millions of Americans, Election Day is already over.

Thirty states now allow no-excuse absentee voting, and most of them also allow voters to cast early ballots in person at county clerks offices or satellite polling places.

In Montana, absentee ballots were mailed Sept. 22. As many as 40 percent of Floridas voters will cast their ballots before Election Day, Nov. 7. Oregons elections are conducted entirely by mail, and Washington is moving that way. California sent out 3.8 million absentee ballots the week of Oct. 8.

Candidates are maneuvering to adapt to a changed political calendar, accelerating their advertising, their mailings and their get-out-the-vote calls. They are figuring out exactly who votes early and are trying to get to them before they cast their ballots. They are raising more money and spending it faster.

Love it or hate it, its the wave of the future, said Art Torres, chairman of the California Democratic Party. Election Day started here on Oct. 10 and lasts 29 days. Its tremendously burdensome on our fund-raising and the people we have out in the field.

Phil Angelides, the Democrat trying to unseat Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger of California, spent $250,000 to mail 725,000 brochures last week, timed to drop into mailboxes the same day the absentee ballots arrived.

Mike McGavick, the Republican candidate for the Senate seat from Washington, pushed up his television advertising schedule to run spots that an aide called his closing argument three weeks before Election Day. More than half of the states voters will cast ballots by mail before Nov. 7.

In the Denver suburbs, Rick ODonnell, a Republican candidate for Congress, said he had been emphasizing his hard line on illegal immigration in recent speeches and advertisements to motivate loyal Republicans who he believed were more likely to vote early. Mr. ODonnell is now pivoting to a message on taxes to try to appeal to independents and undecided voters who are waiting until Election Day.

It is a different message when it is a different group of people, Mr. ODonnell said.

Every day we get a list of additional people who just in the last 24 hours have applied for ballots, he said. The amazing thing is they are voting tonight at home on the kitchen counter. They come up to me and say, I voted for you.

Experts estimate that more than 20 percent of voters nationwide will cast their ballots before Election Day by mail or at early-voting locations, a proportion of the electorate that is rising with each election. Some states and counties open the ballots before Election Day and keep the results secret; others count them with regular ballots.

Analysts and party officials who study early voting trends say that a decade ago those who took advantage of absentee ballots tended to be relatively well off and highly educated, with Republicans outnumbering Democrats by almost two to one. But as the ease of early voting has spread, the ratio is slipping and some analysts say that nearly as many Democrats as Republicans now vote early.

Those who favor the practice say it is convenient for voters and increases turnout. Most elections officials welcome the trend because it reduces the strain on polling places and poll workers on Election Day.

But some experts say there is no proof that early voting increases turnout and may well have the opposite effect because some voters request absentee ballots and then neglect to send them in. They are also concerned that absentee ballots are more open to fraud than votes cast at established polling places.

Candidates and political parties are ambivalent. They can get partisans to vote early and then use them as volunteers to help turn out other voters. They can be sure their voters will not be discouraged or turned away at crowded polling places on Election Day.

But for candidates, the trend toward early voting vastly complicates campaigning, as Mr. Torres said. With voting spread over 29 or even 45 days, candidates have to budget their time and money carefully to make sure they are reaching all potential voters before they cast their ballots. They cannot rely solely on a late blitz of advertising, mail and phone calls to motivate voters. They cannot pray for a piece of late-breaking news to alter the outcome.

Nationwide in 2004, an estimated 25 million votes were cast early, roughly 20 percent of the 122 million total. In 2000, about 14 percent of the electorate voted early. There are no reliable national figures for 1996 and earlier, said Paul Gronke, director of the Early Voting Information Center at Reed College in Oregon.

Absentee voting offers an opportunity for political parties to refine and use increasingly sophisticated methods of identifying supporters known as microtargeting. Starting with lists of voters requesting absentee ballots and then researching how they voted in past elections, parties can identify loyalists.

The parties also use magazine subscription lists, catalog mailings and even cable television choices to further identify potential supporters. Both parties use the techniques, but Republicans started earlier and claim an advantage over Democrats in identifying and turning out their voters.

Critics of early voting, however, say that extending the balloting period can discourage voters and distort results. Curtis Gans, director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, said his research showed that no-excuse absentee voting hurt turnout, although 2004 was an exception.

Mr. Gans said that many voters, concerned about fraud and chaos at polling places after the contested 2000 election, took advantage of the new, more liberal rules for absentee and early voting. But he also said there were more cases of fraud in absentee balloting than in Election Day voting, citing recent cases of absentee vote-buying in Illinois, Florida and Georgia and a concern about overseas ballots in Florida in 2000.

The Georgia case, from 1996, involved two candidates for county commissioner in Dodge County, who set up tables at opposite ends of the hall in the county courthouse offering $20 cash payments for absentee votes. Both candidates were convicted of vote fraud.

Mr. Gans also said that early voting could minimize the impact of events that occurred close to Election Day, leading to what he called a differential of information among voters.

What if on the Friday before the election Osama bin Laden is captured? he asked. Or we had a terrorist act or the stock market tanked, or we learned of a major issue of moral turpitude involving a major candidate?

The weekend before the 2003 election to recall Gray Davis, the California governor, The Los Angeles Times reported that several women had said that Mr. Schwarzenegger, the winning candidate, had groped them. At that point, more than 2 million of the 9.4 million votes cast in the election had already been mailed.

In giving voters more flexibility in casting their ballots, there are those who say that something intangible is lost. Election Day is a civic ritual, they say, the one occasion every two or four years when millions of citizens show up in a public place to exercise their right to choose their representatives.

Absentee voting erodes that sense of community, Professor Gronke said. It is voting alone.

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