Here in WA, 100% of us vote absentee. They call it "vote-by-mail"
and we can either mail our ballots or put them in elections boxes at various locations. (The one I use is in a shopping mall.) Oregon pioneered this method and then we switched over, too.
This has raised our voter participation rate from the middle of the pack to almost the top, just behind Minnesota. Of the top four states in voter participation (Minnesota, Washington, Oregon and South Dakota), two of them are vote-by-mail.
The first time, I missed the ritual of going to the elementary school gym to vote. But this year, watching those long lines everywhere, I'm not missing them at all.
http://crosscut.com/2012/01/20/crosscut-blog/20752/Voter-participation-in-Washington-nears-top-nation/
As its share of ballots cast by mail has steadily increased, Washington state in 2010 reached a new high in national ranking of “voting-eligible population” voter turnout, a more precise measure of civic engagement than the traditional turnout reports on the percent of registered voters who voted. One of only two U.S. states along with Oregon where all voting is now by mail, Washington state ranked second highest in percent of the voting-eligible population which actually cast ballots counted in the November 2010 elections. This is according to a recently updated report based on government data and released by the United States Elections Project at George Mason University.
Although most media reports traditionally frame voter turnout simply in terms of the percentage of registered voters who vote, that measure ignores a sizable group of citizens who are eligible to vote but fail to even register. The “voting-eligible population” in each state is determined by the United States Elections Project by using data from the U.S. Census and the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, as well as the U.S. Department of Justice. Along with those too young to vote, non-citizens and ineligible-to-vote felons are filtered out, to arrive at voting-eligible population.
In Washington state in the 2010 mid-term elections for Congress, state, regional, and local offices and ballot measures, 54.3 percent of voters who were actually eligible to vote turned in counted ballots. Only Minnesota had a higher rate, 55.9 percent. Tied for third were Oregon and South Dakota at 53.9 percent.
SNIP
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