Last week, I spoke at a conference (PDF) on problems in the voting system in Seattle, Washington, a state where the election of the governor is still being litigated, six months after Election Day. In drafting my remarks, intended to put the state's mess into a national context, one aspect I did not prepare to speak about was voting by mail. Knowing this—and to teach me something—the moderator asked the audience of about 150 to raise their hands if they had voted by mail in the last election. Almost every single person in the audience raised his or her hand.

I should not have been caught so off-guard. About seventy percent of Washington residents vote by mail. Washington, like a good number of other states is considering greatly expanding the opportunity to vote early and/or by mail. Twenty-six states already allow "no excuse" absentee balloting, and Oregon runs its elections entirely by mail.

There are clearly many advantages to allowing voters to vote in their leisure at home—voters like it, it may make election administration somewhat more manageable, and some jurisdictions claim it reduces costs. However, for Washington State to be moving even further in this direction is particularly ironic; the current controversy actually serves as a warning bell for some of the disadvantages of this form of voting that states ought to take into consideration before going forward.

While many legislators vigorously pursue enactment of voter identification requirements, it is widely known that absentee voting causes most voter fraud problems. As electionline.org recently reported, a number of states have cited irregularities in recent years. "Georgia Democratic Secretary of State Cathy Cox was quoted in the New York Times earlier this month as stating there was 'already rampant fraud in absentee voting.' Half the country away, Kansas Republican Secretary of State Ron Thornburgh told the Topeka Capital Journal '…The greatest potential for abuse in the state of Kansas in our election system right now is advance voting …We've got a situation where any person may return another individual's ballot.'"

In Washington, after machine recounts and a manual recount, Christine Gregoire was declared the victor of the gubernatorial election by 129 votes. In the ensuing litigation, after getting past the unproven allegations of felons and dead people voting, many of the problems involved absentee ballots. Just a few weeks ago, elections workers discovered 93 uncounted, valid absentee ballots. King County originally excluded 566 perfectly valid and legal absentee ballots because election staff failed to adequately check voters' signatures.

Contrary to what mail voting proponents say, the evidence that mail voting increases turnout is mixed at best. A variety of research (see papers here and here) seems to support the idea that early voting does not really mobilize voters who would not otherwise vote, with the possible exception of states where there is heavy partisan mobilization.

Mail voting over the course of weeks or even months means voters are casting ballots on the basis of potentially radically different information—all sorts of new details about the candidates might emerge and critical events might occur in the weeks and days just prior to the election. In the worst-case scenario, a voter might be completely disenfranchised from voting in a particular race because of early voting. For example, in 2002, Senator Paul Wellstone died in a plane crash well after many absentee ballots had been submitted. Many of those voters were not permitted to change their votes or vote again. It is also not infrequent for candidates to drop out of the race close to Election Day, raising similar problems.

Voting by mail also affects the campaign process and adds some burdens and complexities to the work of parties and campaigns, possibly increasing costs. Rather than focus "Get out the Vote" efforts toward one day, campaigns must engage in such efforts for weeks before the actual "election day." In 2004, we saw campaigns holding rallies and then busing supporters to early voting sites, and delivering absentee ballots. Get out the vote operations are time-consuming and expensive for any organization that engages in them, and prolonging that process only increases these costs. This constant and drawn-out concentration on voter turnout detracts from discussion of issues and the merits of the candidates.

Finally, mail voting detracts from the idea of having one day of collective, deliberative democracy. As Norm Ornstein has written:

Voting is one of the most precious privileges of a free society (as is the freedom not to vote). In America, individuals join their neighbors at a local polling place, underscoring their role as a part of a collective society, then go into a curtained booth to make their choices as free individuals. Every conceivable step should be taken to make the votes cast on Election Day easy to do—longer hours, ample poll workers and voting machines, easier registration, and so on. But we should not make voting the equivalent of sending in a Publishers Clearing House contest form.

Fortunately, in making its plans, Washington is taking extra precautions to prevent fraud in the process. However, that state, and the others that would follow its lead, ought to at least balance the popularity and convenience of mail voting with these other very serious issues.

Tova Andrea Wang is a senior program officer and Democracy Fellow at The Century Foundation.