The absentee ballot system in Illinois must have been created in the days of horses and buggies, when a trip “out of the county” was a journey rather than a commute.
That’s the criterion for receiving an absentee ballot in Illinois. The law states that voters must “expect” to be “outside of the county” on Election Day, or disabled in some way, in order to vote absentee.
What, exactly, does that mean for Chicago area voters who dodge in and out of DuPage, Cook, Kane, McHenry, Lake or Will Counties every day? Do they qualify if they’re out of the county for eight hours? Three hours? What about five minutes across the border, to gas up?
Things have changed since voters stepped into stirrups in the morning, rather than putting the pedal to the metal. More women work now. More people have long commutes through maddening rush hour traffic. Many parents are busier, with shared responsibility for getting kids to and from child care arrangements and school and extracurricular activities.
That means showing up at a polling place to vote often is inconvenient and sometimes impossible for even the most conscientious citizens who take seriously their right to vote.
So it makes sense that attitudes about absentee voting change, too. Isn’t the idea to get more voter participation, rather than less? Shouldn’t the voting system be designed in a way that is most convenient for voters?
At least 24 states allow voters to use an absentee ballot for any reason, according to The Wall Street Journal. Illinois should follow suit.
So far, the courts haven’t seen things this way. Last year a group of working mothers sued the Illinois State Board of Elections for the right to vote absentee. A federal court judge disagreed. On Sept. 8, the case was argued in the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The strongest case against loosening the rules on absentee balloting is that it would encourage vote fraud. But the fact is that unscrupulous precinct workers have abused the absentee ballot process for decades, distributing and collecting ballots from voters as a way to increase turnout of people who can be trusted to vote the way the precinct workers want them to vote.
The only people who are denied the use of an absentee ballot are those who abide by the letter of the law.
The women who filed suit do not want to break the law. They want to vote.
This probably cannot be resolved before the Nov. 2 election, because the state board of elections doesn’t have the power to ignore state law, and the courts, so far, have recognized that.
The answer is to tighten the identification requirements so only legitimate voters can get an absentee ballot and loosen the nonsensical rules governing when and why you can vote absentee.
