The Independent View: Update on Colorado's All Mail-In Voting for 2016

This is an update to a prior post about the 2013 bill to make voting an all mail-in process.

With a new mail-in voting for the presidential primary in 2016, you just mark your choice on your mail-in ballot and put it in the mail. It must be mailed in time for it to arrive at the local county clerk's office by 7 p.m. on the first Tuesday of March 2016, the earliest date on which political party rules permit Colorado to hold a presidential primary.

If you are registered Democratic, your mail-in primary ballot will have all the viable Democratic presidential candidates. If you are registered Republican, your ballot will list all the viable Republican candidates. If you are registered unaffiliated, as one-third of Colorado voters are, you will receive both Democratic and Republican ballots, but you may only vote on one ballot. Voting on both will mean your vote is spoiled and not counted.

Unaffiliated voters will not lose their unaffiliated status by choosing to vote in one of the major party mail-in presidential primaries.

The all-mail presidential primary would give as many Coloradans as possible a chance to vote in the 2016 presidential primary election. Some may fear that allowing unaffiliated to vote in the primary election might encourage "bad-dude" mavericks to vote for the weakest candidate of the opposite party. Studies of this type of voting, however, suggest that this is not a serious problem.

The merit of the face-to-face exchanges involved in the existing neighborhood caucus system can be debated. As veteran political junkies ourselves, we have a lot of nostalgia for the old caucus format. We know that most political reforms have unanticipated consequences, and thus we encourage rigorous analysis of possible biases and unwanted side-effects of this proposal.

But our preference is for encouraging, not discouraging, political participation.

The method by which a state votes in presidential primaries and caucuses is determined by state law; all that would be necessary for an all-mail presidential primary in Colorado would be a bill passed by both houses of the state legislature and signed into law by the governor.

This is not a state constitutional change. Such a bill could easily be drawn up, vigorously debated, and passed in the upcoming 2015 session of the state legislature.

And there will still be party caucuses. After the voters have voted in their respective Democratic and Republican mail-in primaries, party caucuses will be held to select the delegates to the party national conventions. At the convention, however, the delegates will vote for the various party nominees on the first ballot in the same proportions as the candidates finished in the mail-in primary.

Let's encourage as many Coloradans as possible to be part of this vital presidential nomination process and to be able to do so in the convenience of their own homes with a mail-in ballot.