Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, September 24, 1994                   TAG: 9409270034
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
DATELINE: SEATTLE                                 LENGTH: Short

VOTING BY MAIL CALLED A SUCCESS

In seven small to midsize counties, voters marked their 1994 primary election ballots at home, at their leisure. Then they dropped them into the mail.

It was a hugely popular, successful departure from conventional voting - enough so, probably, to put pressure on big counties to eliminate procedural kinks that now would make voting by mail difficult.

Some Washington counties have used mail ballots in low-turnout special elections for several years. But this was the first time in the United States that mail voting has been used anywhere in a congressional primary or general election.

In the seven smaller counties, voters became the vanguard of an electorate who someday might cast all their ballots by mail or who eventually might punch their choices into a keyboard in front of an interactive video screen.

The state's first large-scale experiment with a vote-by-mail election Tuesday was a virtually unqualified success. The counties that used it found mail ballots to be cheaper than regular voting, popular with voters and, as expected, a tremendous boost to voter turnout.

In those seven counties, an estimated 52 percent of the voters participated - far higher than the overall statewide voter turnout of 32 percent, according to state Elections Supervisor Gary McIntosh.