Despite a surge in new voters and predictions for historic turnout at the polls next month, Maryland officials say requests for absentee ballots — seen by many as a way to avoid long precinct lines — remain about average.
About 172,000 Marylanders have requested an absentee ballot as of Thursday, or about 5 percent of the state’s 3.4 million registered voters. Absentee voters in Maryland must sign an oath affirming they can’t vote in person, a restriction that election officials in other states said could exacerbate long lines Nov. 4.
“We’ve been telling people that the only way to guarantee you won’t stand in line on Election Day is to vote absentee by mail,” said Ben Piscitelli, spokesman for the election board in Franklin County, Ohio, where anyone can vote absentee simply by asking. “We took the added step of mailing out postage-paid applications they could send back to us.”
Piscitelli said a third of the 650,000 voters In Franklin County are expected to vote absentee — 88,000 have already mailed in their ballots and 23,000 more filled them out in person at an elections board office.
Maryland voters could repeal the oath requirement in a charter amendment on this year’s ballot that also would allow early voting and voting outside of designated precincts. Ross Goldstein, deputy administrator of the state’s Board of Elections, said the state saw a spike in absentee ballot requests in 2006, when the state legislature passed a bill allowing voters to cast them without listing a specific reason.
Even today, Goldstein said voters “don’t have to be 100 percent certain” they can’t make it to the polls on Election Day to vote absentee.
“If you think in good faith, you may not get there on Election Day, I think that’s reasonable to get an absentee ballot,” Goldstein said.
In states that allow early voting, those voters tend to be disproportionately Democrats while absentee voters tend to be Republicans, said Matthew Crenson, a political science professor at Johns Hopkins University.
Average figures for absentee ballot requests in heavily Democratic Maryland could indicate the Republican turnout might be just that — average.
“In the early voting states, people are sitting there an hour, two hours, three hours, and they are doing it happily,” Crenson said. “In Maryland, I’m not sure they are going to stick it out because the outcome is pretty much a forgone conclusion.”
WEB EXTRA
Click here for information on casting absentee ballots in Maryland.
