Feb. 22 Daily News editorial

Washingtonians have grown accustomed to waiting a week or more after Election Day for the final verdict on hard-fought races. Voters waited several weeks for a decision in the 2004 gubernatorial race between Gov. Chris Gregoire and Dino Rossi. Last November, races for public lands commissioner and state superintendent for public instruction were too close to call for several days after Election Day.

Secretary of State Sam Reed believes much of this prolonged suspense is unnecessary. He’s promoting a measure to eliminate it — legislation that would require absentee ballots to be returned by the end of Election Day, rather than simply postmarked that day. We support this legislation.

Senate Bill 5631 and House Bill 1623 represent the sort of common-sense election policy that Oregon and most other states already have adopted. There’s really no good reason to allow mail-in ballots with an Election-Day postmark to trickle in days after the polls close. Those who can’t make up their mind until the last minute, can drop their mail-in ballots off at a collection box just before the polls close. The drop-off boxes also could accommodate late voters should the U.S. Postal Service cut delivery on Tuesdays to cut costs, as some suspect it might.

No one need be disenfranchised by requiring these ballots to arrive on Election Day. Reed insists that voters would easily adapt to the requirement, and he’s right. As the Seattle Times noted this week in an editorial supporting Reed’s proposal, “In the past election in Oregon’s populous Multnomah County, with 427,000 registered voters, only 136 ballots could not be counted because they arrived too late.”

Mandating that all ballots be returned by the close of Election Day is particularly sensible in a vote-by-mail state such as Oregon. It increases voter confidence in the integrity of the election by avoiding those seemingly endless vote tallies in which the lead flip-flops with late-arriving ballots.

Washington’s election system can benefit from this confidence-building rule. For all practical purposes, this state now is vote-by-mail. Thirty-eight of Washington’s 39 counties vote by mail. The state’s election system also could benefit from the speedier tally of ballots this requirement would allow. Unlike Oregon, which holds its primary elections in June, Washington’s primaries are held in mid-August. That doesn’t provide a lot of turnaround time for the November election, particularly if a close race requires a recount. Elections officials could use the additional time quicker primary election results would give them to prepare for the general election.

Reeds office has worked hard to improve the state’s election process since the controversial 2004 gubernatorial race. There have been more than 1,000 administrative improvements and at least 180 election law reforms over the past four years. This one — requiring mail-in ballots to be returned by the close of the polls on Election Day — is as important as any of those previous reforms.