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Kent Kaiser: Absentee voters deserve more time

This is especially true for those in the military. But a federal order may finally force Minnesota's hand.

By KENT KAISER

Last update: November 3, 2009 - 10:43 AM

President Obama recently signed a law mandating that states give military voters a window of at least 45 days before an election in which to submit absentee ballots. It looks as if this measure will force the Minnesota Legislature finally to move the state primary to an earlier date.

People from across the political spectrum have sought such a change for many years.

Whereas a short absentee voting window is obviously detrimental to voter participation in general, the voters most notably ill-served are those serving in the military. According to the U.S. Department of Defense, about 23,000 overseas military members and dependents were eligible to vote in Minnesota in 2008. According to statistics from the Minnesota secretary of state's office, only 14.4 percent were able to cast votes that counted in the presidential election.

To make matters worse, Minnesota state data indicate that local election officials were 16 times more likely to reject military absentee ballots than they were to reject other absentee ballots, and most of these ballots were rejected because they were returned after Election Day. Many potential military absentee voters actually received their absentee ballots after Election Day. This is shameful.

Legislators should do more than the minimum to comply with the new mandate. They should consider extending the absentee voting window to as long as 90 days, from the current 30. They should also enact several other measures aimed at problems with the state's absentee voting system that became glaringly apparent during the 2008 U.S. Senate election recount:

•Institute a centralized process for administering military absentee ballots. Military absentee ballots are an anomaly for many local election officials and present challenges that regular absentee ballots do not. Administering them requires specialized knowledge and should be streamlined to serve military voters better. The secretary of state's office is already equipped to do this.

•Institute systems of bar codes and central processing of absentee ballots. This would allow election administrators to track the timing of sending and receiving the ballots; track their acceptance and rejection (including specific reasons for rejection where applicable); report absentee ballot statistics after each election, and identify more readily where problems exist in the absentee ballot process.

Having county-level absentee ballot boards process absentee ballots would reduce variances and deviations that currently occur in acceptance and rejection standards when administered by polling place workers who often have already worked long hours by the time, on election night, that they are looking at and processing absentee ballots for the first time.

•Institute "no-excuse" absentee voting. Currently, Minnesota law allows absentee voting supposedly only for people who claim one of the following reasons: absence from their precinct on Election Day; illness or disability; service as a polling place worker in another precinct; religious observance; eligible emergency declared by the governor, or quarantine declared by the government. This law is unenforced and unenforceable. Citizens do not necessarily recognize this and may be deterred from voting.

The law should be changed to allow absentee voting without an excuse. Moreover, a no-excuse absentee voting system would be superior to the various "early voting" schemes that some people have suggested, mainly because early voting schemes do not allow voters to change their minds and revote as absentee voting does. Voters, in fact, change their minds far more often than many people recognize, and not just in extreme instances like the death of a candidate in a plane crash.

Kent Kaiser is a senior fellow at the Center of the American Experiment and a professor at Northwestern College in Roseville. He served in the administrations of secretaries of state Mary Kiffmeyer and Mark Ritchie.

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