As reported in today’ Helena Record.
I’m not clear whether or not this race is competitive for the GOP, but if any have a good chance to be the next SoS of Montana, I hope they will look closely at the empirical evidence on SDR/EDR, vote by mail, voter turnout and vote fraud.
There are good reasons to oppose voting my mail–it removes ballots from the hands of government officials, it lengthens the voting period, it increases voter error (overvotes and undervotes). While the amount of voter fraud is miniscule, it’s also the case that most notable cases of fraud are associated with absentee ballots. However, states with VBM have experienced almost no fraud, have very high voter turnout, and lots of citizen engagement in elections.
I can see no reason for the candidates to oppose same day registration, which has been consistently shown to be cost effective and consistently shows a substantial positive impact on voter turnout. There is no evidence of a partisan advantage to same day registration. All this information comes from the Nat’l Conference on State Legislatures, as about a non-partisan source on these matters as one would want: http://www.ncsl.org/legislatures-elections/elections/same-day-registration.aspx
