The bill that would have made San Benito County a trial area for
five years of all-mail ballot elections narrowly failed to pass the
State Assembly Elections Committee Tuesday, but will be up for
reconsideration next week.
Sacramento – The bill that would have made San Benito County a trial area for five years of all-mail ballot elections narrowly failed to pass the State Assembly Elections Committee Tuesday, but will be up for reconsideration next week.
The bill, authored by Assemblywoman Carol Liu, D-Cañada Flintridge, failed with a vote of 3-3 in Assembly Elections Committee Tuesday with one committee member absent. The bill needs at least a 4-3 vote to pass, according to Liu’s Press Secretary Candice Chung.
If passed, AB 867 bill would make San Benito and several other counties guinea pigs for all-mail primary, special and general elections through 2011. The bill was inspired by the success of the all-mail ballot system being used in Oregon since 1998, which has raised voter participation and cut down on election costs, according to Chung.
“I’m just going to keep my fingers crossed (the bill passes Monday),” said San Benito County Head Elections Official John Hodges Thursday. “I just don’t understand what the reasoning was for not approving it. What would the criteria be for voting it down?”
Proponents of the bill reason that its passage would increase voter participation by giving voters time to peruse their ballots in the privacy of their own homes rather than having to venture out to polling places where they might feel rushed into making their decisions.
But Assemblyman Mike Villines, R-Clovis, one of the three Assembly Elections Committee members who voted against the bill Tuesday, said he didn’t picture such a rosy outcome if the bill passes.
“There were two reasons I voted against it. The first reason is that in any of those districts or counties right now anybody can vote absentee. It doesn’t stop anybody from voting by mail,” Villines said Thursday. “But my biggest concern and the main reason I voted no is we’re still not addressing election fraud, and this bill opens up possibility for election fraud. We’re not serious in California about really addressing voter fraud, I believe, and when you take that into consideration and say let’s just go to mail, I think that’s bad public policy for California. To me it’s very clear and logical.”
Hodges said Thursday he doesn’t think an all-mail ballot system would increase voter fraud in San Benito County, since his office checks signatures on ballots against a computer and will even be calling voters whose ballot signatures don’t match the ones on file starting with the Measure L election in May. He also believes voter participation in San Benito County would shoot “way up” if the all-mail ballot bill passes.
This was found to be the case in Oregon, where voter participation was the 10th highest in the country before voters approved an all-mail election bill in 1998. By 2004, the state had the fourth highest voter turnout, Chung said.
Liu’s office is also predicting an all-mail ballot system would lower the cost of running elections, as there would be less of a need for voting equipment, poll workers or leasing polling venues. And the only new equipment the county might need would be a relatively inexpensive extra absentee-style ballot-reading machine, he said. A typical election in San Benito County costs around $50,000, he added. According to information from Liu’s office, all-mail elections typically cost about 30 percent less than traditional elections.
Although the bill didn’t get enough votes to pass on Tuesday, Chung said yesterday she doesn’t expect Liu to make any changes before it goes back to the Assembly Elections Committee for reconsideration on Monday.
“I think at this point it’s going back as-is,” she said.
If the bill passes, San Benito, Calaveras, Mendocino, San Mateo, Santa Cruz, Sierra and Ventura Counties will participate in the trial run of all-mail elections in California. Based on the success or failure of the new system in each of the counties, which were chosen to represent a cross-section of rural, medium-sized and urban counties in California, the assembly would decide whether to implement a statewide vote-by-mail system in 2011.
