Why Some States Are Moving To Vote At Home

Welcome to Another Way, the podcast produced by Equal Citizens, a nonpartisan pro democracy organization founded by Lawrence Lessig. This is Adam Icken, the organization's campaigns manager. Before we begin, please support us on Patreon. With your support, we can keep this podcast going. To sign up, go to patreon.com/citizens that's P-A-T-R-E-O-N.com/citizens. Now to the episode. Today we're going to dig into a reform that we have only briefly mentioned on this podcast, Vote at Home. I admit, throughout my years of advocacy, I've largely ignored Vote at Home. Not necessarily because I thought it was bad, but because I thought other reforms, same day registration, automatic voter registration, ending felon disenfranchisement were more impactful. But that all changed when I first met this episode's guest, Phil Keesling. We were at a conference in Nashville, Tennessee, and within minutes of our first interaction, he had already convinced me that I was missing something big. So my hope for today is to give our listeners a similar experience. And before we begin, a little bit about Phil. He began his career as a journalist in Portland, Oregon, and served as an editor of the Washington Monthly magazine in the early 1980s. A Democrat, he served in the Oregon House of Representatives, and he was Oregon's Secretary of State from 1991 to 1999, where he championed the successful 1998 ballot measure that made Oregon the nation's first state to automatically mail ballots to all active registered voters ahead of every election. He has also served in the private sector and as Director of the center for Public Service at Portland State University. Currently, he is the Chair of the National Vote at Home Institute. You can find more information about that@www.voteathome.org. so, Phil, welcome to the show.

Thank you.

So I want to start with your time as Secretary of State. We haven't really talked much about what a Secretary of State does on this podcast, so let's start there. What is a Secretary of State?

Well, in Oregon, in most states, the Secretary of State has nothing to do with foreign policy, but the most common function we have is running, overseeing the election system in each state, and that's working with local election officials. And in Oregon, Secretary of State has some broad authorities, but elections are really run at the local level here as well as most other states. But as a Secretary of State, you're in a position to administer the laws or some equally. And you're also in a position to promote policy changes, to try to make democracy more accessible to More people, which is where vote at home comes in, because that was a legislative fight that we had to take on in order to expand the franchise and get everybody in Oregon to be in a situation where they're automatically getting mailed out ballots.

But why were you so interested in becoming Secretary of state? What drew you to that position?

Well, it was accidental. I actually was. I got elected to the state legislature where I could do policy. I loved it. 1988, I knocked on about 10,000 doors, come from behind victory. Found myself with the Oregon Legislature in 1989. And by the way, I voted against the one and only bill that came up that year that involved the expansion of this idea. You know, I'm a bit of a traditionalist, but about the crunch of autumn leaves under crisp autumn blue skies and meeting my neighbors at the local polling place appealed to me. So what happened was after 1990, the governor, new governor Barbara Roberts, had been secretary of state. She had to vacate that office when she won election as governor and had the chance to appoint somebody. And I ended up getting the appointment to an office that I had actually not thought a whole lot about, quite honestly, before I arrived there. The age of all of 35 years old in 1991.

Hmm. So it was unexpected. And what were you thinking? What were, what were you thinking when you first took office? I mean, what were the issues that were of concern? Because in the early 90s, we're in a very different environment than we are today in terms of the fight over the franchise. So what were some of the things that when you first took office you were thinking you were going to pursue?

Yeah, on the election side, campaign finance reform for sure. Even in 1990, Oregon had some of the most expensive races in the entire country for state legislature. And it's kind of a mind boggling thing. State of Oregon, we're a part time legislature where back then you maybe made 20,000 a year, but we had no limits whatsoever and I thought we should have them. We were discouraging people from running because the massive amounts of money that they had to raise at the time I had to raise $30,000 to win a tough Democratic primary fight. Today it's 10 times that because we have not solved the problem in Oregon, brought it fester. So that was the main issue that I was concerned about on the election side was the issue of campaign finance reform. And when I came into this office, bit unexpectedly, I was not a big advocate of vote at home. I was going to learn some more about it, but I quickly realized in talking to county clerks who were big part of being Secretary of state, that they had a long history with it and some very, very strong feelings about why it made sense. And I began to listen to them, but I didn't come to my conclusion right away.

Right. So this is the great story that I want to dig into, because you are now known as the father of vote at home. And you will push back on it. You've pushed back on it in the media, and you'll say, that's not true. I think the word you used is you were the midwife. You were the one who kind of maybe brought it into being statew, but you don't like that term. So why don't you tell the story of how vote at home became a thing in Oregon and your role in it.

So I arrive in 1991, and 10 years have gone by in which a former secretary of state, a Republican woman by the name of Normal Pollis, has been pushing this idea. And she started pushing it because a county clerk named Del Reilly, a conservative Democrat in a rural county, decided that an idea he'd read about in California in a special district was worth trying. Local elections would typically get 5%, 7% turnout. School board races, bond measures for local districts. And he thought that was terrible. You gear up all these polling places and then you, you know, 19 out of 20 voters wouldn't even show up. So he literally put his professional career on the line. It's an elected office, county clerk. And decided that this was worth trying. And in 1981, he was given permission. Secretary Pollis pushed for it. We needed to change the law to let it happen. And held an election in which not 7% showed up, closer to 70% showed up in that local election.

Wow.

What happened was that other folks said, huh, what's going on here? And they realized a couple things pretty quickly. In addition to higher turnout, they were saving a lot of money. And the reason they were, even after the cost of mailing out all these ballots to everybody, was that you weren't having to set up these polling places and pay all the poll workers. And it's a challenge even then, about poll workers. I remember soon after taking office, I was at a table with some county clerks. One mentioned that she thought the average age of the poll worker in her county was now 75. At which point another clerk leaned across the table and said, how do you get them so young? It was obviously there to show, but it's a challenge. We have probably 3,000 polling stations set up across the state of Oregon and getting enough people and sometimes people show up sick or the polls don't get open and you could have problems at the site. So people say it saves money, it boosts turnout a lot. And this is interesting. Voters who might initially say, well, that's a crazy idea. Oh, I like going to the Post. Once they do it, they really like it. It's like the Green Eggs and Ham story that I know I read as a kid and read it to my own kids. You know, you just, oh, bad idea. Terrible, terrible, terrible. All these bad things can happen and you start doing it and you realize, wow, this is good for small d democracy. During the 1980s, more and more counties got on board. Secretary Powell was pushed to keep extending the two year pilot period to let more and more people have it. So that by the time I got to office in 1991, Oregon law read specifically that the counties at their discretion could use it for any election except the primary and the general election. That the statute read explicitly, these shall not be conducted by mail.

Right. And so what happens next?

Well, what happens next is I have to run in 1992. I've decided that let's try it in primary. Maybe not such a big problem. Turnout in the generalist tribe in primary. My Republican opponent has been the sponsor of the bill to make every election this way. He's pushing it hard. It'll save all this money. It'll get more people to turn out. The clerks are beating me up. We generally like what you've done, but why are you being so timid about expanding vote by mail? We should do it for every election. Well, I end up winning the election with this kind of, this in between muddy response. But within a year or two, I'm looking at data, looking at how much it does affect turnout, and I fully support it and go into the 1995 legislative session pushing the bill, being able to say, look, it has bipartisan support because my Republican opponent, I'm supporting his bill take every election, vote by man.

So, but let's dig a bit here about what really changed your mind, because I think this was one of the most fascinating parts about talking to you when we first met, when you admitted to me you originally really opposed it. And a lot of it came from this idea that election day. There's something magical about this day that's sacred.

We love it, it resonates. And if you think about it, virtually everybody in my former profession, journalism, they care so much about politics and they themselves like this idea. Although interestingly, a lot of them, when they're working have to end up voting by absentee ballot. But what really did it for me was I realized, I call this a bit of an epiphany. I was confusing a well known and to many beloved ritual of American democracy with what it essence, which is participation. And we have as a country struggled to make the franchise real and meaningful and even legal for all these citizens. You go back 200 years, had to be white, you had to be male, you had to own property, maybe 6%. Then, you know, we said, after an awful civil war, okay, by then the property qualification had dropped, but you still had to be white and male. But the amendments after the Civil War said, okay, blacks, but male were slaves and freemen could be, but not women, not Native Americans. Then it took to the 1920s to pull the other half of the population in women. It wasn't until 1923 that Native Americans explicitly were given the right to vote. And then during much of this period of time, clever people are suppressing the vote and shredding the promise that's on the law by enacting poll taxes and literacy taxes that are then unequally applied based on race. And so the struggle to make the franchise meaningful is still an ongoing struggle. And though the barriers are less explicit, I realize that the logistical barriers of modern life with people that are working more than two jobs, single parents having transportation issues, this notion of the polling place that has this image in Norman Rockwell paintings about this great American community building thing, has more and more become a barrier, literal barrier. And you see that now with surveys that have been done for the last 20 years with Pew and others ask, what was it that kept you from voting? And most of those reasons are logistical. Something came up at the last minute. One of the things that really reinforced why this should happen is I was picking up my child from preschool after one of these elections and the preschool director was almost in tears because a crisis had arisen late in the afternoon of election day when she had planned to go and vote. She had to deal with the crisis and she ended up not being able to vote. And she was just furious about it. And I've heard so many of the stories over the years. People that had the intent, it was important to them, but something intervened. And why should we let bad weather, well, a sick child or family obligations or a change in work schedule, why should we let that stand in the way of Americans who want to exercise the most fundamental of their constitutional rights? So by 1995, I was a full on advocate of this in the Oregon Legislature and we got the bill passed on the very, very Last day at 2 o' clock in the morning of the session. And then a really remarkable and awful thing happened.

Well, pick us up. Where are we going next on the story?

Democratic governor earlier asked their agenda looks great. Let me know what I can do to help decide he might veto the bill. He is encouraged to veto the bill by the Republican whose name is on it. Well, I'm not sure this is such a good idea after all. But more important, he's encouraged to veto it by the Democratic National Committee and a lot of prominent Democrats because why? Well, you know, when more people vote by mail with absence, they sometimes end up flipping races that look like we've won them on election night. And then the Republican, this is not good for Democrats. Chair of the Democratic National Committee was in Oregon after all this came down and said, you know, it's like giving people vitamins without anything nutritious to eat. I still have a hundred dollar standing reward that I've never had to pay up on for someone who could explain to me what that means. But the bottom line was the governor vetoed this. It was after an unexpected victory actually, because you had to push it through recession. It wasn't easy. Worked on it for six months. Suddenly we're back to ground zero.

And were you furious?

Yeah, I was furious. And two years later we took it back to the legislature and all the Republicans who voted for it had done a 180 degree turn on it. They led the charge to prevent it from coming out. And the only choice we had was to go to the ballot initiative which passed 2 to 1. The reason that the Republicans turned a 180 on it was that three months after the bill was vetoed we had a certain U.S. senator Bob Packard who resigned. And under Oregon law that's a special election. And under Oregon law, special election was up to the Secretary of State with consultation with all the county clerks who I think has once said, Phil will threaten to feather you and run you out of town on a rail if you don't make this a vote by mail election. So we did, first ever in the country and we ran it in late 95. It was primary, January of 1996, general and somewhat unexpectedly, though he worked hard and I think earned it, it turned out that a Democrat narrowly won that race. Senator Ron Wyman is still in office. And suddenly that confirmed to a lot of Republicans in my state at least this is a bad idea. And they locked down against it. Democrats then said, oh, maybe you Know, it's not quite as bad as we thought. I personally think it really doesn't advantage either political party any guarantee. It just depends on where people are in terms of their ideas about views about voting. The parties have to fight that out. But we had record turnout in the special election. I think it was 66% of registered voters. And think about that for a minute. But significantly higher than you get in a midterm election nationally. That's the highest basically, I think, in the nation's history in the 20th century for a special election for US Senate vacancy. And it proved it. The Krieg lights were on. It was a nationally looked at election. While there were unfounded allegations of fraud and mischief, nothing ever happened. And most importantly, Oregonians loved it. It was convenient. They got high turnout. Even those that weren't happy with the election results said this worked well. And that took us into the 1998 ballot measure, which passed 70% to 30%, overwhelming majorities. Both political parties carried every, every county. And since 2000, Oregon has run every single election. This last.

It's absolutely fascinating how, you know, these election reforms can become partisan based on who wins. Right. We saw this with ranked choice voting in Maine in the second Congressional District. It's not that ranked choice voting benefits one party or another, but in the first case, the Republican was ahead on the first ballot and after the votes were reallocated according to second preference, the Democrat ended up winning with majority support. Exactly how the system should have worked. But now all of a sudden, Republicans think that, or a lot of Republicans in that area, especially led by the Congress or the former congressman who lost in that race, turns it into a Democratic, you know, big, big D, Democratic power play. And you see this again and again, that these reforms that are on their face, neutral become partisan based on the results of an election. Which is insane.

Yeah, it's very sad. And that dynamic 20, 25 years ago is probably even more intense today. And I go back to small d democracies. What's important, I happen to be a Democrat. I would never win a Democratic primary if I were to run again for statewide office, which I definitely am not. Because over the years I have had views and said things that have not always pleased the Democratic establishment. There clearly are people that benefit or see themselves benefiting from lower turnout elections. And I see it with certain Democrats, particularly around primary elections. Lower turnout is better for my base. I see it among Republicans. Same thing. Primary dynamics, even more. In some ways, more so in general elections. You know, my favorite one of my Favorite quotes was in Montana when Montana had a special congressional district agency. I think it was back in 2000, might have been 15 or 16, but. Or 17, I think it was early 17 and bipartisan group of legislators who said, yeah, this will save a million dollars running it by all vote by mail. We already have 70% of our population already signed up for permanent absentee ballots. Montana is one of the highest in the country, Arizona and California and it's, you know, the weather might be bad. What's not to like about this? And they pass it through one of the houses. At which point the Republican leadership in the state panicked because I think they truly believe that more people voting might have let the seat go Democratic. And my favorite quote from a leading Republican was, well, you know, Washington and Oregon and Colorado all do this. They've got physician assisted suicide and legal marijuana. You know, totally laughable reason. No one will ever say this is a bad idea because we want fewer people to vote. I mean that would be just ridiculously stupid on the right. But that's what they really often mean when they raise concerns about fraud and tradition and spousal influence or labor unions or corporations are going to tell people how to vote. I mean, it's not that you can't have people doing really stupid things that might even be crimes. We've had examples of people voting twice or forging a signature of a spouse. But you get caught at the felony and I put people in jail that we caught because of that. We've had maybe a dozen cases, over hundreds of millions of mailed out ballot over the last 20 years. But as a county clerk once said to me about that argument, you know, Phil, you ever ask yourself why crooks don't counterfeit pennies? I said, no, I hadn't really thought of that. He said, phil, if you're going to do the crime, you go for the 50s or the hundreds, why would you risk the jails is flat. You're not going to affect an election ballot by ballot by ballot. In this situation. There's far smarter ways to try to steal an election if you're willing to commit a felony. And that stuck with me because again, sure, there are examples out there of people doing things. There's examples of people doing things that don't involve vote at home ballots. But on balance is successful of this reform has been remarkable. I tell people that if that country had voted at the rate that Oregon did in the last midterms and we were lower than Colorado, we would have had 20 to 25 million more votes cast. Now, might that have helped the Democrats more, might have hurt them and brought out more rural, know, working class voters? I don't know and I just don't care. I care that in a world in which very notion of democracy all these is being challenged on so many fronts, I care about getting as many of us to weigh in on these important decisions as possible. Because when that happens, more of us are accountable. More of us have a stake in what happens. We can't just check out and blame it on those people over there that somebody else has put in office. I had nothing to do with it. And I think that's the existential threat that we face right now is a society in which fewer and fewer people even engage in the most basic of small d Democratic acts, which is the franchise.

Yeah, I think that's exactly right, Phil. And you know, so. Okay, so since Oregon passed this law and moved to a vote at home system, there have been a number of states that have joined it. Can you talk a little bit about the progress, the way in which this idea that started in the 90s has spread mostly, you know, in the west, but across the country.

Yeah. In fact, the next state was Washington state and it was. The charge was led by two Republican secretaries of state, Ralph Monroe and Sam Reid. They chaired the same way as I did. Doesn't matter which party it benefits, we're going to. It's good for democracy. Washington did it in a bit of a slower way. They just simply passed a law that let the counties do it for any election. So we let the counties do it for any election except primaries in general. Our law passed, we actually mandated it for primaries in general because it was a lot easier to write an initiative petition to separately remove the were not from the statute. So it shall be conducted this way. Washington left it up in the county and the rural counties came out of the gate first, experimented with it, really loved it. Bigger turnout, saved a lot of money. They could use their dollars for other moves within their local communities. The last two were Pierce and King, the most Democratic counties. But I think they finally threw in the towel and they realized, yeah, saves money and you get higher to that. And in fact it made a big difference. There was a big election up there where Christine Gregoire won probably about the closest gubernatorial race in modern history. I think it was 131 votes. Sam Reed, the Republican had to be in charge of the recount of the Democratic that eventually declared the Democrat a winner. You can imagine some of the dynamics around that. And they were all of course, all male ballots. And Sam did a wonderful job with great integrity and could point out very correctly in that situation, every single ballot has been directly marked by the voters themselves. We have that ballot. We have a confidence in that recount because of that, that otherwise wouldn't exist, especially for these machines that don't have any kind of counting paper backup. The next state that did it was Colorado. Washington's fully in by 2012, I think, or 2010. Colorado's next. The dynamics are also very interesting. The Democrats, their big prize, they saw the same day election registration. That's what we really want to do. Well, there's logistical struggles with that. And if you study same day registration, which I'm a big fan of, if you study it, most of the people are not new, never been registered before voters, they're existing voters who need to update their registration because they've moved and forgotten to tell the clerk. So the Democrats, that was a big problem. The Republicans, Secretary of State hated that. But the county clerks, most of whom were elected Republican in effect, said, well, we can live with same day registration, but you have to go along with making every voter get their ballot through the mail because 60 to 70% already are. But they're applying for it. It's clumsy. We have to set up the same polling stations and fewer, fewer people are coming. It's a waste of money. It's confusing. Let's pull these things together. And there was some terrific leadership in Colorado. And I want to say single out Amber McReynolds, who's the CEO of our national Vote at Home Institute. Amber was one of those clerks. Denver county had watched this and watched it evolve. And she and others got in there and convinced legislators that this was the way to go. And while Republicans at the end of the day did not vote for it, it clearly was a bipartisan effort by election officials, officials to say this is a more rational way to run our system. And actually, I think Colorado now has an even better system than Oregon. I can go into that in a while if you want, but they did it in 2013. So the 2014 election was their first one. And now we have three more. Utah, a very red state, very red. They decided to do it county by county. And in 2018, all but one county had done it, a very small one, and they'll be full on in 2020. Hawaii, a very blue state, will do it for the first time in 2020. And about 15 counties in California who also have the county option. They are going to do it in 2020. As well. So you now have six states where at least at the county level you have it. And so we've basically the momentum is building as is our efforts to try to decriminalize absentee mailed out battle. That's a big issue too, because we're not going to get 40 other states to do this immediately, but we can get a lot of states to make it a lot easier for voters who provide prefer to vote this way, do it with mailed out ballots. And Virginia just went to no excuse anyone to do it by asking. Pennsylvania did it earlier in the year. Michigan did it by ballot measure two years ago. But there's still about 16 states that literally make it a crime. But I don't think about it. It's a crime for me as a voter who simply wants to do it to reclaim if I do not have a legally valid excuse for it. And that's something that needs to change as well. Yeah, that's the evolution of how we've now reached the point that something like 42 million people voted by mailed out ballots in all 50 states. And there was about 12 million of those in 2018 who automatically got their ballots delivered to them in states that every voter gets something with it.

Yeah, you're absolutely right here, Phil. And yeah, the fact that in 2018, 42 million Americans or their ballots were mailed out nationally is incredible. And you know, I think on Vote at Home's website in 2020, you're projecting over 50 million could potentially be mailed out. And another interesting little fact here is that in 2018, a full 60, 69% of all votes cast in the west were from mailed ballots. So there really is a change here. But I want to get a.

Sorry, one more thing. Amber McReynold, our CEO, enjoys greatly, and I think that's a great point, he says, yeah, it's mostly in the west right now. And guess where women won the right to vote first. Right,

Right. So I want to go into the weeds a little bit because that's what we do on this podcast, especially when it comes to democracy policy. So there are five real, there are five different laws, let's say there are five different variants of voting by mail. So the one that we mostly focused on, the one that you're advocating for, the one that's in, in the west, in Washington, Oregon, Colorado, Utah, California and Hawaii, is vote at home. And so that system for our listeners, if you haven't picked it up, is that the government actually sends the ballot to every registered voter. There's no applying for the absentee. It's you're sent the ballot.

Right.

But that's not obviously the case in all different states. As you said Phil, that the lowest, the worst law possible is you need an excuse to get an absentee ballot. That you need a certain excuse one that the government deems is the only acceptable excuse and you have to fill out a form attesting to the fact that you, you know, have that excuse, that you have something that the government says you know is a valid excuse to request an absentee. The next one is a kind of step two, Stage two is an excuse required with a waiver for age. Phil, that's pretty bizarre.

Yeah. Defensible in my mind. But yeah, that 65 year old retired person would also be then get one just by asking for one. Even though I've got three cars and I'm in perfect health and the 33 year old single mother of two is working two jobs to just keep food on the table for a kid. Can't.

Right. So when I was learning about that on your website I was pretty baffled because that really doesn't make much sense. So step three is much better which is no excuse absentee. This is, this is good, this is a good transition for the states on step one and two to make which is that you can request requests an absentee ballot and you don't need an excuse, you don't need to, you know, check a certain box that the government deems is the only valid excuse to miss an election. And then step four, and this is a little again weedsy but it's a permanent mail ballot option, in other words that you can just check a box and say that from here on out I always want to receive ballot. So essentially it's an opt in voted home system. It's not as good as vote at home because vote at home just automatically register sends out a ballot to every registered voter. But this is essentially if you know you're not going to be there, if you know you want to vote by mail all the time, it sets up a permanent vote by mail system for those people who opt in. Now any our listeners should know that opt in systems are never as good as opt out systems like with avr. The real key with AVR is that registration moves from something you opt into to something you have to opt out of when it comes to interacting with the government agency. And you get more people participating in that program. So it's a good step, but it's not as good as vote at home,

right And I think you've outlined it brilliantly, if I can say so. And that notion of opt out is central to it. Now I never articulated this way 25 years ago when we were pushing it, but if you think about it, all we do is we say as a government in Oregon, that if we know you are a properly registered voter, it is our obligation to send you your ballot. Now you can opt out of voting by just simply recycling it. Okay, we hope they recycle it. President VERNON but that's what it is. It's opt out now. In 2015, Oregon became the nation's also first state to pioneer another option, opt out Innovation, which is upstream of that. Gee, if we know you're a citizen because of transaction at the Department of Motor Vehicle, again, it's our obligation as a government to register you and then we'll send you a notice that says, bill, you can opt out of registration if you want. It's all your call. We do a third thing, by the way, which has gotten way too little attention, which is an opt out updating of an existing registration. And automatic voter registration does this, although most people think that it's important for the never registered before, but let's say you're already registered. For 20 years we've been able to use under our state law, national change of address when I move and I, I forget to tell my clerk I've moved. And we know that renters are five times more likely to move than homeowners, 25% a year in some cases. So they'll get out of, out of sync with what their voter registration record should be. We can simply say looks like you've moved based on your telling the postal service you've moved. Still, we've updated your registration to the new address and again, if that's not right or you want to go back to your old address, maybe you're just, you know, living with your brother in law or your house to get remodel, you know, just let us know and we'll keep you at your old registration and you can even walk into an election office up to election day and update your update as it were. So we have a, we have a full breadth opt out kind of paradigm for our election system at all these key steps of the process. And the result is we have some of the cleanest, most up to date registration rules in the country. All the voted home states do. And we, in a sense, you think about it, we're leaning forward, not leaning back. Most states use national change of address as almost a Gotcha game. If you don't look like you've moved, if you don't return this card, you might get purged. Think about how different that is in terms of how it's trying to. Is that trying to push people out or trying to bring people in and make sure that they stay in? And so getting into the weeds of these things is important because you understand the basic principles that are at work here, not just the specifics of a particular policy agenda. It's a new way of thinking about the business model, for lack of a better word, of democracy.

Right? And Phil, there's something you said to me that I truly will never forget in our first encounter. And it was that you framed vote by or vote at home as you know, an obligation of government. You said it's the right to vote. And the government is incumbent upon the government to do everything it can to give you that right, to empower you. It's the government's responsibility, dammit. And they need to do everything they can to give you that power. And you said that in such an artful way and it just, it has stuck with me ever since because you're right. The government should do everything it can to ensure that ability.

Right? And it's a fundamental right. I argue it's a civil right. It is foundational to this experiment of 230 plus years. There's another aspect to this too that I particularly like and that's. It takes away the excuse, okay. Or it reduces the excuse. You know, in a sense when you've leaned forward and done everything reasonable to do it, then it's up to the voter. And one of the two things that happened that and this has played out that find particularly interesting one is when you ask people why they like it. It's not the money that gets saved or even the convenience, although all of that is there. But over and over again people tell me I felt I cast a more informed balance. I go, whoa, so you feel better about your vote? Yes, that's what I really like best about it. Now back in 1991, the Internet really wasn't around, okay? You couldn't sit at your kitchen or dining room table and try to find out about candidates by just googling their positions on an issue that suddenly you weren't sure where they were on it. We had a voters pamphlet size of a phone book at that point, the old analog 1463 printing press version that's getting information. But that has really struck me over the years is that voters feel better about casting more informed ballot and That's a healthy thing. The other thing though, and this is important about the we that you mentioned and the detail, we don't call a vote by mail anymore. Not because some fancy marketing firm said we should rebrand. Okay, I had an epiphany about four years ago. I was calling it by the wrong name. And still that way in the statute, most people in Oregon actually do not vote by mail. They don't return the ballot by just simply putting a stamp on it. Now we're going to prepay postage. They actually take that ballot in person and return it to any one of 300 drop boxes that are set up across the state. I could be 300 miles away in a different corner of Oregon at work and I'll drop my ballot off and we'll get back to the home county in time for counting as long as it's there by 8pm on election day. And the reason that Colorado, I'd argue has an even better system than Oregon at the moment kind of hurts my pride to say that as Oregonian, but it's true is some voters need more than just a place to drop their ballot off on Monday or Tuesday. They need to update their registration or they need assistance, maybe kind of disability or they need language assistance. Well, in most counties in Oregon, there's one place that you can go to on election day or for that or before and that's the county election office in the county seat. It could be 50 miles away in Colorado. There's I think more than a dozen of these in Denver County. Throughout the whole county you can go to any one of them and they even have even more as election day gets closer in California, California, which replicated the Colorado model, there's numerous of these voting centers where if you imagine they're like a full service election office, I can replace a ballot. Heck, even if I just am so old fashioned, I need to have somebody hand me that ballot. It's just really important to me. I can go to vote center and do it. So vote at home is where most people in the system end up voting. It's a more accurate way to look at it. And it is premised on that basic notion that government doesn't do everything. It doesn't turn cartwheels. We're not going to set up a vote center at every former polling place that would be so expensively prohibitive and a waste of money to do. We're going to give reasonable accessibility to all of our citizens. With laws that he could proving who paid postage that reach out to certain Voters for whom voting is more difficult, including with a paper ballot. And we should move forward in that way and not step back and say our job is to simply run a smooth election without glitches. And this is where I want to actually make a really strong criticism of any of my former journalists that are out there, many of whom are going to express great frustration because the results don't come in as quickly. I want to tell them very bluntly, get a life and cool your jets. No, you will not find out by midnight in California if the race is close, who will get the most votes in the California Democratic primary. You may in fact have to wait just two or three days. And why do you have to wait? Because a lot of people do bring their ballots in on Monday or even Tuesday. You need in most places to count the mailed out ballots last because that's the only way you can prevent double voting. Got to make sure no one went to the polls. Does happen. We count them last because the integrity of the election matters. It. And don't you care about integrity? You're bleeding about it all the time. And we count them more slowly because we have to verify the signatures on every one of them because that's a matter of integrity as well. And we want to get the count right. And higher turnout is better, even if it takes 24 or 48 hours, maybe longer sometimes if the race is really close to declare a winner. The Republic is not going to collapse because the final results are not in on election night. You may have to go to bed if you're a candidate or a journalist not being able to make a definitive call and disappoint some of your leaders. I not only don't care, but you are part of the problem. You're insistent on knowing as soon as you can about who's won. And again, it is about trying to enfranchise as many people so their voices are heard and having an election system that is geared to them. Yeah, this is what systems like this do.

I think you're absolutely right, Phil. I mean this has been a big frustration, especially in places like Arizona, which could be a tipping point state in the 2020 general election that, you know, there are some states that just maybe won't be able to report on the same night. And part of that is a large, large part of it is that, you know, people cast their ballots via mail or Dropbox or wherever. And you know, the, I'm frankly very worried that the, the, you know, the media, the journalists aren't prepped, aren't ready to, to prime the public for that. And people are going to think that it's, it's somehow fraudulent if on election night 2020, uh, you know, we go to bed and Trump is winning in Arizona, and that's the tipping point state. But all the votes from Maricopa county are, you know, a lot of them are mailed in and counted after the fact, and then all of a sudden the Democrat is up by one or two points. Will people be calling fraud? Uh, I fear the answer is yes. But that just, as you say, goes to the, you know, the real. The need for journalists to inform the public that slow counting isn't necessarily bad, especially if it's about securing the election, making sure every vote counts and making sure that everyone has the right to cast a ballot in a way that is conducive to them and you know, their schedules. So I think you're 100% right here, Adam.

You make. You said it far better than I think I even could say it. But I do want to reinforce it because I think this is so important. The typical political reporter and even some of the best known journalistic organizations in the country are aiding and abetting the doubts and aspersions that are cast on the basic integrity of the election system. The example you use is spot on. And how do you counter it? Well, one of the ways you counter it is you not only explain to people how the counting process works, but you have the very data that you put up reflecting it. Right. And I'll give you a smaller table, but it's really reflective of this. A couple days ago, I actually literally wrote a bit of a screed to a couple friends at the New York Times, which is where I go often to get my election results. It's true of virtually everybody. For 30, 50 years, the tally of votes has in the lower left hand corner a description that's called percent of precincts reporting. And when results come in in the first hour in a typical battleground state, that number may be 10 or 15%. And you look at the numbers and yeah, 10, 15% of the votes have been talented. I still hold out hope because I think they're from rural or from urban areas or whatever. People play that game. And a lot of smart commentators are able to show their stuff because they understand those data. But the problem is the metric itself. All that did explain is what percent of those precincts has reported any results. So as the evening goes on and you see the number creeping up to 50 to 60 to 70% in most states, that don't have mail voting. Yeah, that's probably close to the number of ballots California, okay, 100% of the precincts have reported. But what people don't understand is that you probably get twice as many total votes cast as what the current totals reflect because of all of these ballots that have to be processed correctly. And in California, they left postmarks. So literally valid ballots will come in on Wednesday, Thursday, Friday. And the refusal of these leading organizations to even qualify the statement reporting some results is probably less inaccurate than precincts reporting. But even more importantly, these are put the estimated turnout, I mean, you will know within five, six, eight hours after the polls are closed. You'll have a pretty good sense of what the trajectory is. California gives you the exact statistic. We've got this many counted, we have this many to process. Let's add the two together. Now we know really what the estimated turnout is going to be. But by not doing something as simple and as obvious as that, we play exactly into that hand of the flipped rate and it could go either way. Democrats would be ahead. Then suddenly it flips to the Republican what's going on? Doubts are raised and it undercuts the sense of integrity in an election system which unfortunately, this president has done more to ruin, along with people like Kris Kobach, the former Secretary of state of Kansas, who was a Republican like Sam Reed and Ralph Monroe in Washington state, but was as unlike them as the weather is in Arizona and upstate New York in the middle of February. So these basic understandings of how elections work and those in the media who might have influence on this, we've got some of the most obvious, simple and basic work to do. Why aren't we doing it? Especially with the stakes so high this year. I literally could not get a turnout estimate for the Nevada caucus as an example, until I think three days after it was over. Maybe I didn't look in the right place, finally found the answer, which was all of the 15% of registered Democrats, by the way, and for way longer than it should have taken. So thank you for raising that point about how bad reporting of results by the smartest political journalists in America and the most respected organs, how bad imperfect and even misleading reporting about something as basic as how votes are counted and when they're counted is actually contributing to the very undercutting of integrity that others very explicitly want to push.

Right. And I actually do wonder whether or not moving forward, we shouldn't release results until 100% are in. That is something that I've been thinking a lot About.

Well, you can't, unfortunately, you can't do that probably with freedom of speech laws that we have. And also not sure we want to because, you know, a lot of people don't understand that Most states take 20 or even 30 days to do a final certification of election results down to the last digit. Okay. Because sometimes signatures are missing from ballots, provisional ballots have to be looked at. Is that person really eligible to vote? Under a variety of rules. And it's very complicated now. Most of the. Everybody has moved on probably at day two, because almost every election is decided. And even if those remaining votes were to go 100% for the candidate who's slightly behind, it's still not going to make up the difference. Again, you can do basic math and know someone even has a ghost of a chance at a recount. But I think in the immediate term, much better education. And that's the job of the media and the job of journalism. And it's not just that, it's issues of exit polls. I actually just published a story in the Washington Monthly about how wrong the exit polls have tended to be over the years about who the actual electorate is. We don't realize that the median age of the people that voted in the presidential election in 2016 was 51. They have the same turnout. It's going to be 52 probably this year. Now, you can drive that down as you get more people in. And will we get more people in? Probably. But the typical voter in America is a lot older than most people think it is. And when you see an exit poll, as you did after the 2016 election, that said that the median age was actually 47 of those who voted because that's half the sample. And you go, oh, I guess the people that didn't vote were even older than the people that did. Well, a lot of journalists just look at that. And because that's a really good. About preferences. Yeah, probably, you know, Trump did win those white, non college educated voters by that much. They just run with every piece of data, even the stuff that's demonstrably, almost laughably bad. And we paint it, we end up painting a different picture of who's actually voting than the real picture is. And that leads to similar types of confusion. We do know in voted home states that the people that turn their ballots in Monday and Tuesday are demonstrably younger than the people that turn in their ballots a week or two ahead of time. Older voters probably more settled in their choices, more organized in their lives. Perhaps they'll send it in, you know, 10 days out or 12 days out. A lot of people, particularly in urban areas, younger people, they'll wait. And that's maybe not such a bad strategy either, because things can change in the last week or two of an election. But you leave it up to voters to decide when they want to vote, not just how they want to vote. And that's the choice of this. It's not mandatory vote by mail, which some people, academics and others insist on calling it. It is. You mail everyone their ballot. So they start the election with their ballot in hand. They can decide how they want to return it, how and where they want to vote it. Hell, they can throw it out on the Wednesday before and then change their mind on election day itself. And they said in Colorado, they can walk into any one of those vote centers and said, now I've decided I do want to vote after all. Can I get my ballot back? And they'll say, of course. Here you go.

Yeah. And I just.

What a beautiful day.

And I just. The thing, Phil, I love so much about this is that if they mail you the ballot ahead of time, it no longer becomes almost like a pop quiz. Like, I'll be honest, I do, you know, politics for a living. And there are. Sometimes I go to the ballot box and I'm just like flabbergasted. I'm like, I did not know this was on the ballot. So having the time to actually research is just such a wonderful thing for our democracy. And I have to say, Phil, that the, you know, on the vote at home website, website, I was pretty shocked that, you know, in just the last two years, I want to read a little bit about the progress that's been made about, you know, transitioning to a more accessible, you know, voting systems across the country that just in the last two years. In 2019, Utah reached full vote at home. Hawaii passed a law that takes them to vote at home in 2020. New Jersey passed permanent, you know, single sign up absentee. That's stage four as earlier we talked about in 2018. Nevada did the same thing in 2019. California will have more than 50% of their voters in counties using 100% mail in ballots in 2020. Michigan in 2018 and Pennsylvania in 2019, as you discussed, passed no excuse absentee with a semi permanent option. New York took the first step towards a constitutional amendment for no excuse. New Mexico passed a law requiring local elections by mail out mailed out ballots. Nebraska went to 11 counties using mailed out ballots for 2020. Florida fixed a law around signature curing California, Oregon and Washington passed prepaid return postage, which is also great because then the onus isn't on the voter to pay for postage. That's so much Progress in just two years.

Phil well, Amber McReynolds, our CEO of National Vote at Home Institute, it's just got a marvelous job. She's got credibility among election officials, officials among legislators. She's done it, she's worked it with people that have been supportive of us. And I think it's a reflection of how people see an idea and once they think about it a little harder, they understand it, grasp it and say this is worth giving a try. And I want to stress too that it's a work in progress. We keep making improvements in our systems. The problems, you know, signature churning is a good issue. A lot of states with mailed out ballots do not give people a chance to correct a signature if they forget it or to update it if their signature has changed. In a good system, you give people time during that period after an election to have something like that happen because signatures do change. I might have a medical condition, might break my arm, you name it. So that constant improvement is a part of this as well, and what best practices are. And so people interested in this movement and it is a movement, www.voteathome.org Ask what you can do in your state to kind of further this along, especially in the states that still require an excuse. The states that say excuses required, except if you're above a certain age, what's that about?

Right?

If it's good for somebody, it ought to be good for everybody in a jurisdiction. And again, this is about small D democracy. I've watched over the years people on either side of the great partisan divide think that this is a huge threat to them and their best interests. I still run across, again, I don't care. None of us should care. We should want a government and elected officials that reflect who we are as a people. The whole notion of representation that is premised on that. We'll have our fierce debates about what we ought to do and who we ought to choose. But at the end of the day, legitimacy of the system matters. And to go back to one of the most basic, I just tell people that we're using an 8th century BC technology here. I think that's about when the Chinese discovered paper. A paper ballot is at the end of the day, I have more confidence that the voter and the choice the voter makes is reflected on that. And I see these big vendors that want to push their eight thousand dollar Machines and get states to put seventy, one hundred million dollars into the latest and greatest. Oh, this one is, will work. It doesn't have security hackability problems. We figured it out. The voter goes to the touch screen and it'll actually mark a printed ballot and then you take the printed ballot and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Heard this for 25 years, okay? And I keep asking myself the question when I, when I hear this sort of stuff, well, why is that better than a voter directly mocking it? And I've actually heard some arguments, I've actually heard some things people on their websites have said, well, you know, voters sometimes will skip a race and these machines will let people know they've skipped the race. And I ask them the question about, are you sure you don't want to vote for the county coroner? Or a voter might mark two people by accident. Don't we want to be able to tell the voter that you've accidentally marked two candidates in that race and we won't be able to count your ballot at all? Well, yeah, but I weigh that against what you said. People being able in their timeline to study the issues, go deeper if they need to call up their sister in law or even their parents or kids that find out a little bit more about an issue which you get when you vote at home, that's infinitely more valuable than being almost a nanny state, to use a familiar word. Oh, we need to force people go to the polls with these fancy new machines because we really don't want to run the risk that, you know, a small handful of them will accidentally vote twice or skip a race.

And if you give people more time, Phil, they are less likely to make that mistake if they're not, you know, nervous in a polling booth and have

to get to work and vote further down the ballot, catching those more important races that they often skip when they're in a hurry. State legislators, county office, sometimes the ballot measure questions. And like, I'm not saying that this is going to cure arthritis and the common cold and stop the coronavirus in its tracks, although someone raised an interesting argument the other day, which is that might the fear of coronavirus suddenly cause turnout to plummet at these polling sites? Because polling sites are a place where a lot of people congregate who might be a little bit sick, but think, well, yeah, but I got to go out and do my duty to vote. So, you know, fascinating argument. I hadn't even thought of it five days ago. But you know, we have in 2020 a hugely consequential election of Course, always a consequential election. I don't want to be exaggerated here, but we have the ability to continue to move policies and practices that reach out to people and make it easier for them to cast their ballot the way they want to under the circumstances they choose. And that's a libertarian argument. That's a conservative argument about freedom, and it is a liberal argument about choice. It is all of that together. It is red, it is blue, it is purple. And when you see states like Utah doing it, you see Nebraska doing it in 11 counties, although they have to be small enough. What's that about? Not North Dakota. Does it. 31 other counties. This is something that can unite us at this very contentious time in our history around something that's important to all of us. And sure, it's not going to protect against every conceivable problem. No election system is absolutely foolproof, error free, not susceptible to problems. But what's the one that's least susceptible and the most accessible to voters in a democracy? I think it's this one. So we won't make people do it overnight. If you go too quickly, you actually might not do it as well as you need to. But let's continue to make steady progress on this. And most importantly of all, decriminalize the absentee ballot for the 40% of Americans right now that literally can't get one for the simple reason of wanting one. And I'll tell you my favorite excuse that's on the books that in Indiana will let me qualify for an absentee ballot where my neighbor can't. Do you know what that is, Adam?

What?

I'm a registered sex offender. Certain provision of Indiana law, and this kind of just puts the absurdity of these excuse required laws into perspective. Well, I'm sure what happened there was we don't want our polling places are at schools. And do we want people that are registered sex offenders to be walking into schools on school day to vote? Sounds good to me. I'll vote for that. Okay, Pound the table and then say, yeah, but you've got to have an excuse. Okay? There is no excuse that I'm aware of in the 60s, states that require it for a public health emergency. Right now, that's maybe the more important question about the coronavirus and what else might it, you know, knock on wood. So the first thing we ought to be doing Everywhere in all 50 states is just simply saying anyone who wants one can get one. And then we can go from there in those states to see how much further you want to Go in terms of making it automatic or even building your system around. But that'd be a good start.

Right, right, right. And I think one of the key things is also for communities that may not have easily or easy access to the postage system, to the postal system, making sure that there are ways for those individuals can to vote under a vote at home system. Right. That making sure. This is why you know the, the vote centers and drop boxes are so critical that we really have to go further than you really have to be creative in how we make sure people can access the system. Because it is possible that there are, we know this, that there are some communities that are really remote and don't have easy access to the polling locations. I'm sorry to the post offices and

you know, Oregon we have tribal nations.

Right, right, right.

And ought to be a vote center on, on every reservation. Some people live on reservations, do not have physical addresses.

Well, right.

You can register to vote in Oregon in most states by just simply saying where you're located. Okay. GPS coordinates would do underneath a bridge. If you happen to be homeless at the time, you just arrange for your ballot to be somewhere else or you go to a vote center to get it. There are ways to solve all of these problems and the acceptability is absolutely key. Now again you don't go overboard and say well we used to have 3,000 polling places so now we're going to have 3,000 voting centers in our state. You want to consolidate. I'll make one other thing that the federal government can do because there's been a lot of stuff about how the federal government ought to help in new and there's a lot of contention on either political party about it. And HR One big omnibus bill passed the House. We know it won't have any stance of getting out of the Republican controlled Senate. What I have told the people I know in Congress is do one simple thing and one simple thing only. Wait on the other stuff that's not going to happen. You know, here's the thing that you should do and I'll call it a democracy stamp. Okay. Pass a law that simply said any ballot that's mailed out in a federal election or any ballot mailed back postage will be paid by the Congress of the United States. Simple thing. It may cost 20, 40 million a year. It's a flyspect in the federal budget. But make it a basic principle of law at the federal level. The federal government should stay out of a lot of election stuff. They should do certain things. At other times they go Too far. Make it a basic principle that any time a federal office is on the ballot, all the Postal Service needs to do is send Congress a bill to pay for the postage of ballots in both directions. Isn't that an elegant way for the federal government to be constructive in this space rather than mandating somebody's favorite idea or not? Again, let's start with ideas that are going to actually make a difference and that you can find bipartisan support for. I love to have that bill come up on the floor and listen to what opposition to it would be. What's not to like about that? This federal government has pumped over half a billion dollars to the states with virtually no criteria. Oh, whatever you decide to spend it on, it's just fine. And a lot of states are rushing out hellmen to buy voter machines that still have serious questions about their security and the hack ability. But heck, if it's somebody else's money, well I guess we'll buy a bunch of them hundreds of millions of dollars for that. They couldn't afford a small fraction of that to give every voter in America the equivalent of a democracy stamp so they never have to worry. And if states and local governments don't have to come up with the money,

that would be a game changer.

Yeah, which we know easy good ideas don't always get that far in Washington D.C. but ain't that the truth? I encourage people listening to this. That might be a good place to start. How to encourage the vote at home evolution and the continued progress of it in their state and across the country.

Right. So in concluding words, Phil, vote at home increases turnout, makes elections much more accessible, especially for down ballot races. Gives people a chance to study the ballot. So it's not a pop quiz. Reduces the cost of elections. What else? Any final words about this amazing reform? Can it do anything else?

I think you summarize it well and I always have to be careful. We're not over promised. I think the final thing I would say though is that as you know, Louis Brandeis once said that that states are the laboratories of democracy. And just because you've created a system at a given moment doesn't mean you can't continue to be improved. And I think even vote at home systems can continue to be improved. But I'll go back to that basic principle of what this system is about. And that is the notion that it is at the end of the day an expression of the very core value that was put in our constitution 230 years ago and which we have been trying to live up to ever since, which is this notion that every person who is a citizen, which is how we define it now, that could change. But right now, every citizen of this country is equal. Now, we obviously were so far off the mark in 1789 with that, when the franchise only extended to maybe 6% of the adult population. Okay. And it's still not there. We still need. The felon disenfranchise movement is so important. And I so applaud what happened in Florida, the legislation now, trying to undo it, shame on them. But we are trying to live up to that ideal and we still have a ways to go. Let's not just think it's a matter of the laws and the rights that we articulate. Let's also think of it in terms of the barriers, what's necessary but what's unnecessary that we set up. It's just the basic logistics of how people interact with their election system. And I would argue that this is in that same very important tradition of progress, of expanding the franchise, even in meaningful, in the most meaningful way, making it accessible to as many people as possible. And that, I think, is what makes democracy work not just in a given election cycle. We got to think about the long term here. And I think vote at home is clearly a way that has that as its lodestar.

Absolutely, absolutely. And I think that, you know, as we always say on this podcast, that these reforms are iterative, that all these reforms, you know, these pro democracy reforms, you know, they all build on each other and the more that we can pass, the more we can push the ball forward, the better for our democracy and the better each one of these reforms works individually and together.

Automatic voter registration works a lot better now because it's paired with forward at home.

Absolutely. And with same day registration and with pre registration, etc. Etc. And that's, I think that's how this movement is going to win, is that by all of us pushing these different types of reforms and, and, you know, enacting them in law and figuring out the ways they work together well and the ways that they don't work together well, and fixing it when it doesn't work and vote at home is, is, I think, the next frontier.

Well, and if we can get very strong Democrats and urban areas and the strong Republicans in rural areas and say on this one, let's unite hand in hand, let the chips fall where they may. Accessibility is an issue in both our communities and this is a good idea, let's work on our state legislators to do it. Because it is a state legislature. State have to make these changes and change the laws. It's a great cause and hope people listen to this will decide they want to help.

Well, that's a great way to end it. Thanks so much for joining us, Phil.

Thank you. It was a pleasure.

And for those who want to learn more, you can go to voteathome.org this has been another episode of Another Way. Please do consider supporting us on Patreon and I'll see you next time.

Sa.