On Point: The vote's in the mail

Published January 17, 2007 at midnight

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Denver's crack Election Commission had three ballots mailed to my house this month, spurring a search in the attic for any freeloader who'd escaped our notice. My wife and I still have no idea where the third voter lives - he apparently occupied our place in the early 1990s - but are sorely tempted to fill out his ballot, sign his name and return it with the others.

We won't, of course: It would be a serious offense. But the experiment also might be useful: Would the phony vote be detected? Would we be contacted by an election official, or detective, demanding an explanation?

My beef with all-mail elections has always been, in part, this problem of mass mailings to people who voted in the past but who, for all anyone knows, may have hightailed it to Tibet. The Postal Service is supposed to divert such deliveries, but of course it doesn't catch them all.

To obtain an absentee ballot, you must ask for one. But in an all-mail election, the ballot simply shows up at your house.

Or at someone else's, as the case may be.

Yes, Oregon has proved that all-mail voting on even a statewide basis is possible without an outbreak of scandal. But election officials there do have an advantage over their counterparts elsewhere: They specialize in that form of election - indeed they don't hold any other kind. So their workers are better trained to match every signature on a mail ballot with one on file.

Even so, there's no telling how clean their elections actually are, according to John C. Fortier, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of the book Absentee and Early Voting. "While Oregon's signature check is more thorough than other states'," he writes, "it is not clear if fraud involving forgeries and impersonations would be detected."

Forgetful . . . and petty

A little over four years ago, Colorado voters rejected a plan for an Oregon-like all-mail election system. The Rocky Mountain News opposed Amendment 28. The Denver Post favored it.

Why recount this history? Because the Post seems to be suffering from a case of amnesia.

In its lead editorial Tuesday, the paper mocked the instructions on the mail ballot for this month's charter election in Denver as "confusing," "awkward" and even "baffling" - when in fact they are mostly the sort of standard procedures necessary for any such ballot.

What was the Post thinking: That with all-mail elections, voters could use a felt-tipped marker to scrawl "Here's one for Kerry" on a dog-eared postcard and that election officials would accept it as valid?

In its pettiest jab, the paper even complains that the 63-cent postage needed to return the ballot isn't "handy" or divisible by 39 (the amount of a standard stamp).

Well, if the postage isn't "handy" and voters don't want to use two standard stamps and thus waste 15 cents, they can drop off their ballot for free at one of 12 locations around town or use a "drive-thru" location on Election Day.

What's baffling is that anyone considers this task a mind-bending challenge.

Must not have been trying

A lawyer for Benon Sevan, the former United Nations honcho in charge of the notorious oil-for-food program for Iraq, has dismissed the bribery and fraud charges filed this week against his client as trivial and baseless, according to news reports.

We'll see about baseless. But the lawyer has a point about trivial. After all, the U.S. attorney of the southern district of New York has accused Sevan of pocketing a mere $160,000 in illegal commissions. Given the magnitude of the oil-for-food fraud - perhaps the greatest scandal in the history of humanitarian aid - you've got to wonder at the lack of ambition of a scoundrel whose shakedown doesn't net him millions.

Vincent Carroll, editor of the editorial pages, writes On Point several times a week. Reach him at carrollv@RockyMountainNews.com.

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