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Oregon's mail-in U.S. Senate election that ended January 30 was, by nearly all accounts, a huge success. The 66 percent turnout exceeded all Oregon's previous special elections and the state saved roughly $1 million in the process. "What was remarkable about this election was how unremarkable it was," says Secretary of State Phil Keisling. "It was one done with the virtual absence of even any allegations of fraud and undue influence."

Oregon's success with vote-by-mail, in which voters usually have three weeks to return ballots, will certainly boost the efforts of Keisling and others to expand its use, in the Pacific Northwest and elsewhere. It's an electoral experiment which affects not only voters, but the candidates and journalists who cover the campaigns.

Oregon has long used the U.S. Postal Service to assist in conducting local and special statewide elections, but the Senate race signaled a shift to using it for bigger contests. In fact, in 1995, the Oregon legislature authorized mail-in ballots for all elections in the state. The legislation was vetoed, however, by Governor John Kitzhaber, who wanted more experimentation first.

 He soon had his chance. When Bob Packwood resigned last year, Keisling chose to use a vote-by-mail election to replace the disgraced U.S. Senator. It was the first federal race to be decided in that manner, but not the last. On February 27, North Dakota conducts the nation's first vote-by-mail presidential primary. Two weeks after that, Oregon will follow suit, completing its vote-by-mail presidential sweepstakes on March 12.

Across the border, in the state of Washington, a fifth of the counties experimented with vote-by-mail local elections in 1995. In addition, for the past two years, all Washington voters have been able to register for "permanent absentee status," allowing them to mail in their ballots in any election. There are no statewide statistics on how prevelant the practice is, but Secretary of State Ralph Munro says that in some counties nearly half the registered voters now use mail-in absentee ballots.

The lure of postal democracy is not limited to the nation's upper left-hand corner, although it does seem to have a northern bent. Keisling says he's received recent inquiries about vote-by-mail elections from Michigan, Minnesota, Montana, and Vermont. The U.S. Postal Service pushed the concept in newspaper ads in January, noting that in Oregon the system cut costs and raised participation.

 But that's not the only draw of voting by mail. The lack of a single election day has changed the pace of Northwest politics, seemingly for the better. For example, the usual barrage of negative TV commercials slowed in the final days of voting in Oregon this year. It seems that the more time people have to think about misleading advertising the less power those ads have. The attack ads came, but early enough so that reporters could analyze them thoroughly. (The Oregonian was particularly good at dissecting unfair ads.) Washington Secretary of State Munro says the same thing happened in the vote-by-mail campaigns in his state. "Traditionally, the press has always struggled with how to deal with last-minute smears," he says. "Vote-by-mail virtually eliminates them."

Journalists also had to alter their campaign strategies. For one thing, they had to get started earlier. Standard election coverage tends to hold back extensive candidate profiles, key issue analysis, and voter guides until late in the campaign, when voter interest is presumably highest. With a three-week "election day," that isn't possible. During the December primary, for example, The Oregonian published some of its most ambitious articles, including its endorsements, just before the ballots were mailed to voters. The paper then continued to follow up and expand on campaign issues as the ballot deadline neared, which seemed to make the coverage more sophisticated and less dominated by daily attacks.

The most intriguing issue that voting by mail raises for journalists has to do with polls. The names of voters who cast ballots are public records. That means that in a mail-in election, reporters could compile a list of people who have returned their ballots during the first two weeks of the voting period and conduct a poll. "Given the methods of modern-day polling, we could figure out which candidate was winning or, in some cases, had already won," says Mike Devlin, news director at KATU-TV, the ABC affiliate in Portland. "But we're not going to do it."

 Devlin's discomfort with airing a poll in the middle of a voting period was widely shared in Oregon. In fact, no news outlet published or aired a poll after ballots were sent to voters in the Senate race. Even The Oregonian, which conducted a survey of voters during the primary race, kept its findings to itself. Peter K. Bhatia, the paper's managing editor, says the poll didn't show anything surprising. If the survey had shown an unexpected development, he says, the paper might have published the results. "We're not in the business of withholding news, but, because the window [for voting] is so much wider we might have to consider a higher threshold for what is news.

 "We're trying hard to focus on issues, on what voters need to know instead of the daily firing of misinformation between the two campaigns," he says. "Vote-by-mail makes that focus easier, and that is a good thing."

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