VOTING BY MAIL: DON'T RUSH TO BAD PLAN

Voting by mail is being used around the country with mixed results. In Missouri, mail ballots are rarely used. Current law limits the procedure to local-issue elections that don't involve candidates. Now both the House and Senate in the Missouri General Assembly have approved similar election bills that include a pilot project that would move vote-by-mail to the big time by using St. Louis County as a guinea pig.

Voting by mail is fraught with opportunities for error and fraud. But the Legislature appears willing to go along with such boosters as Secretary of State Bekki Cook, who is pushing to have St. Louis County's 600,000 registered voters vote by mail in next year's presidential primary.

The secretary of state, like many election officials around the state and around the country, would like to find a way to increase voter participation. And Missouri's experience with its one and only presidential primary -- in 1988 -- drew 30 percent of the state's voters, far more than the approximately 2 percent of voters who had participated in the previous presidential caucus system used by both Republicans and Democrats.

But there are many hoops to go through before Missourians can participate in mail voting on any large scale. Officials at the secretary of state's office have been trying to keep abreast of those concerns, which include:

-- Mechanics: In a primary, voters must choose which party's ballot they want. Would all 600,000 registered voters in St. Louis County get a packet of ballots representing each party, choose one, make their choices and return those ballots to be counted? What would happen to the discarded ballots? How would the election process be safeguarded to make sure the unused ballots aren't marked and also sent in to be counted?

Another method might be to send registered voters a postcard that could be returned indicating which party's ballot a voter wanted to receive. This would eliminate the problem of unused ballots. But it wouldn't address the issue of how to determine whether the registered voter -- or someone else -- actually marked the ballot.

-- Participation: Under the National Voter Registration Act, local election officials have less leeway in keeping their voter lists up to date. The act, which allows voter registration almost anywhere at any time, requires names to be kept on voter lists until after two elections have passed without participation.

Each county keeps track of who votes and who doesn't, which means each county has a list of active voters and a list of inactive voters. Would mail-in ballots be sent only to active voters? Would postcards be sent to every registered voter?

These are among the issues still being hammered out in the Legislature, along with a separate issue regarding party rules about when national convention delegates can be chosen. Democratic rules, for example, don't allow primary voting before March 7. Some election officials across the state would like to see the presidential primary held on a date other than April 4 next year, when cities, school districts, counties and many other local jurisdictions hold elections -- often producing complicated ballots in each precinct. Still other officials believe an early presidential primary would generate more interest.

A bill passed last year set the presidential primary for April 4 next year, but Secretary of State Cook sees an earlier mail-in ballot as a way to avoid adding confusion to the regular April election and to increase voter participation -- if all the details can be ironed out.

Frankly, the unknowns of mail-in voting appear to outweigh the objectives of using that process. Even though the St. Louis County presidential primary would be a test, the opportunity for the process to go bad is all too apparent.

With just days to go before the current legislative session ends, it would be best to delay such an ambitious project rather than rush through a plan that backfires.