Absentee Voting

Circumstances of all sorts—business travel, illness, military duty, vacation—may keep many registered voters away from the polls on election day. In such cases the states have long allowed the absentee to vote by mail. To promote convenience and thereby raise voter turnout, many states permit residents to request an absentee ballot without stating any reason. Oregon went one step further, eliminating polling places altogether; the 2000 and 2002 elections were conducted entirely through mail-in and drop-off ballots. Despite some problems, the experiment was generally deemed a success, with a sharp increase in voter turnout.

In conventional absentee voting, the citizen applies for an absentee ballot that must be returned within a designated period set by law. For the vote to be certified and counted, the voter must carefully follow the canvassing board's instructions, because in a recount a flawed ballot will be challenged and might be thrown out. Absentee votes have decided many contested elections. Much of the litigation that occurred in Florida in the 2000 presidential election revolved around absentee ballots without proper postmarks and requests for absentee ballots that lacked a voter identification number, which Republican Party volunteers filled in, in violation of the law. Whether such ballots should have been thrown out, as the Democrats claimed, was at the heart of litigation mooted by the U.S. Supreme Court's 5–4 Bush v. Gore decision halting the Florida recount.

In today's busy world, when voters may not have the time or capability to travel to the polls on a given day, the idea of absentee voting for all is gaining wider acceptance. Even polling officials, who cannot leave their posts during voting hours, must use absentee ballots if they are assigned to a polling station in another district.

About half the states now have an “early voting” option, including “no-fault” absentee voting open to all voters with no need to plead sickness, disability, or any other reason for wanting to vote before election day. The number of early voters has grown so significantly that candidates are increasingly adapting their campaign strategies to them. In Florida in the elections of 2000, for example, the Republican Party mailed applications for absentee ballots to about two million registered party members. The Democrats also used this strategy, mailing roughly 150,000.

Since 1980 the absentee vote in presidential elections has grown steadily. In 2000 about 15 percent of voters nationwide cast absentee ballots; in California the figure was 25 percent.

The availability of absentee voting has long been helpful to Americans living outside the United States. Both major political parties have overseas organizations of absentee voters, Democrats Abroad and Republicans Abroad. At the 1996 and 2000 Democratic National Conventions, Democrats Abroad had nine votes divided among twenty-two delegates, including eight superdelegates and delegates elected regionally and worldwide. Republicans Abroad send observers, but not voting delegates, to their national party conventions.

Federal Legislation