Voting by mail

That's such a smart idea. Imagine not having to drive to the polls, stay in line waiting for your turn, maybe with your kids in tow, being late for dinner or work or whatever, possibly in bad weather.

Who needs that? Especially when you can just receive a card in the mail, make your picks, and send it back with other regular mail? It's so easy, and apparently cheaper, you'd think we'd be doing it already, right?

Since Oregon adopted Vote by Mail as its sole voting option in 1998, the state's turnout has increased, concerns about fraud have decreased, a complete paper trail exists for every election, recounts are non-controvertible and both major political parties have gained voters. Moreover, in doing away with voting machines, polling booths, precinct captains and election workers, the state estimates that it saves up to 40 percent over the cost of a traditional election.

Vote by Mail could offer real advantages if it were adopted nationwide. Voters would not need to take time off from work, find transportation, find the right polling station, get babysitters or rush through reading complicated ballot initiatives.
[...]
Perhaps most important, given the concerns about voting machine security, mail ballots cannot be hacked. Tampering or interfering with mail is a federal crime, and the United States Postal Service has its own law enforcement arm, which works closely with a variety of enforcement authorities including the F.B.I. Trained election clerks can take the time to check signatures without delaying or discouraging voters. And the advantages of a paper trail outshine the glitter of black box electronic gadgetry.
[...]
Public confidence in the accuracy of vote counting is at an all-time low. The Election Assistance Commission estimated that as many as 850,000 votes were not counted in the 2004 elections, and a recent report warned that electronic voting machines cannot be made secure. Fortunately, a remarkably sophisticated and effective technology exists for solving these problems, and it is ''old-fashioned'' mail.

Hard to argue with that. I hope the current Congress will take this matter seriously and act on it swiftly. Certainly, electronic voting machine's makers will spend millions in lobbying efforts to keep widening the spread of their faulty product, but hopefully reason will prevail.

In the end, all that really matters in a democracy is the right of everyone to vote. If you doubt your vote counts, you won't vote, and that's the end of democracy, because an ever decreasing number of people end up electing, and therefore making decisions, for the rest of the population.

The US already has a very low turnout at the polls, especially for midterm elections, so striving to better the system by making it more user-friendly should be a priority of every politicians.