Blake: Postal Service working to stamp out late-arriving ballots

Published May 13, 2006 at midnight

Text size

More Opinion Columns & Blogs

I didn't know the U.S. Postal Service gave anything away. You get a little discount if you pre-sort a mass mailing, and that's about it.

But it turns out that the Postal Service itself paid for the mailing of absentee ballot applications to all 260,000 active registered voters in Arapahoe County this week. The permit number on the envelope is the giveaway: G-10.

Think of this freebie as a loss leader. If the Postal Service can prove it can handle ballots efficiently, maybe it will get more election business in the future.

Arapahoe County was the beneficiary of this experimental program because it suffered the worst, or at least the most publicized, problems during the all-mail election of 2005.

It certainly didn't have them all. The Adams County clerk was said to have received several trays of ballots three or four days after the election that had been postmarked Oct. 21.

Arapahoe Clerk and Recorder Nancy Doty said she persuaded the Postal Service to "partner up" with her office on the recent mailing because "we're trying to track down some of the issues" that plagued the elections division last fall. Voters in some parts of the county didn't get ballots on time or at all.

Doty and Dale Harmon of the Postal Service signed the letter to the voters, which explained the three ways you can vote in the Aug. 8 primary and Nov. 7 general election this year: Absentee ballot, early voting or polling place. No "vote centers" in Arapahoe yet and all-mail ballots are prohibited in even-year elections.

Arapahoe County paid to print the letter but the Postal Service paid to deliver. The envelopes were placed on trays bearing special tags identifying them as "election materials" so that they didn't get lost in the shuffle. Apparently it went well, with most letters arriving within 24 hours of being dropped Wednesday.

Theoretically, mail addressed to persons no longer at the address is returned to the county clerk's office.

Mike Wheeler, USPS manager of marketing for Colorado and Wyoming, supervised the project. He declined to give a specific cost but maintained it was minimal.

The secret to success: make sure the mail is dropped into the system at postal centers in Denver or Colorado Springs.

Apparently the biggest problems with mail ballots in years past were the result of counties contracting with out-of-state vendors. It could start with the printing or the mail preparation, but the most likely cause is the use of private trucking contractors.

They tend not to take off until the truck is full, or they don't make money. The vendor might confidently drop the mail off at a distant post office, only to have the contract trucks sit around for up to a week before heading for Colorado.

The distant vendor might cost less but unless the county can make sure the mail is dropped in a Denver postal facility it risks not getting delivered in time.

The Postal Service is working with all the counties in the state, said Doty, to make sure ballots are delivered. Wheeler said the Postal Service will report to the Colorado County Clerks Association June 9 on the Arapahoe County experiment.

By the way, other counties that might like the Postal Service to pay for their mailings to voters are out of luck.

Al Kolwicz, frequent critic of mail ballots, complained to Secretary of State Gigi Dennis that mailing unsolicited absentee ballot applications isn't authorized in law and urged her to stop the Arapahoe County experiment.

"Sending an unsolicited absentee ballot application along with the name and address of a person who election officials consider to be an eligible voter is a problem," he wrote. Another recipient at the address, or a "dumpster diver," might steal the identity of the address and cast fraudulent votes.

He suggested that blank absentee ballot applications be available in public places or on the Internet instead. In fact many counties do have Web sites from which the appliction can be printed.

Dennis dismissed Kolwicz's complaint. "This is not a security breach," she said. "In fact, I consider it good customer service." The recipient doesn't need to respond, she noted.

Arapahoe County has been automatically mailing absentee ballots requests to its voters in even-numbered years for a long time, said Doty.

In other counties the solicitations may be paid for by the local political parties, but because of contribution limits the parties don't have the money they used to. It's a relief to the parties to have the taxpayer pick up the tab instead.

In under the wire: Lost in the action of the legislature's final hours Monday was the Senate's unanimous confirmation - finally - of Gigi Dennis as Colorado's 34th secretary of state. She'd been sworn in last September but the Senate was in no hurry to make an honest woman out of her, possibly because she had recommended that Senate President Joan Fitz-Gerald not be allowed to run for another term this fall. Fitz-Gerald won a court battle on the issue.

blakep@RockyMountainNews.com or 303-892-5119.

Subscribe to the Rocky Mountain News