Polling places will be a thing of the past and voting will be done almost entirely by mail if the Island County Auditor gets her way.

Auditor Suzanne Sinclair hopes to make the change to all-mail voting just two years after spending more than $80,000 in federal dollars on new voting machines.

Thirty-four out of 39 counties in Washington currently use a “vote-by-mail” system. King County, one of the few holdouts, is also jumping on board.

Sinclair said her request is being made largely because of voter confusion, rather than a simple desire to follow the trend.

“What we experienced in 2005 and early 2006 was that because there had been so much publicity about so many counties going to vote-by-mail, when we did a couple of our special elections by mail, it created some voter confusion because people thought, ‘OK, now we’re by mail,’” Sinclair said.

In the following election, polling sites were open, further exacerbating the confusion.

“People were calling the office and saying, ‘My husband, son, wife, daughter, got their ballot. Why didn’t I?’ It was a logical question,” Sinclair said.

The county is already authorized to do certain special elections by mail if requested by a jurisdiction. Switching to vote-by-mail for all elections can be accomplished one of two ways, Sinclair said.

“One is by dividing precincts down to where we have fewer than 200 active, registered voters going to the polls in each precinct and declare it a vote by mail,” she said.

She has created a number of mail voting precincts in this manner.

The second, more straightforward approach is to ask the Island County commissioners to pass a resolution approving vote-by-mail elections. The auditor officially made the request at a recent staff session.

Sinclair and at least two of the commissioners are admittedly poll voters, she said. Two or three regional voter centers would be established to give people a secure, physical venue to drop off their ballots.

“What I would like to do is have one in Oak Harbor, Freeland and the Camano Annex, as well as the administration building in Coupeville,” Sinclair said. “It would be a place for people who didn’t want to put their ballot in the mail. It would have a secure box where they could drop off their ballots.”

Disabled voter access units would be available in the regional voting centers for people requiring the service. The rest of the election would be conducted entirely by mail.

“Everybody would be mailed a ballot, so there would be no issuance of ballots from the regional voter centers,” Sinclair said. “If you needed a replacement ballot, you would have to come to the courthouse.”

The Legislature last year dumped the traditional September primary date. This year the primary election will be held on Aug. 21.

Filing week will take place June 4 through 8, rather than the traditional last week of July. She said the early election date was not a factor in considering a complete shift to vote-by-mail.

“The prime considerations were making the process easier for voters and less vulnerable to error, as well as keeping Island County voters on an equal footing with the majority of Washington State voters,” Sinclair said.

Using federal dollars, the county purchased 12 new disabled access units in late 2005 for $6,500 apiece and one used unit for approximately half-price.

The voting machines saw action for the first time in last year’s primary election. Most of the equipment, bought with Help America Vote Act funds, will be mothballed if the commissioners pass the vote-by-mail resolution.

“In a vote-by-mail environment, if we were to establish regional voting centers we would not use probably eight of them because we would have one at the courthouse, one at the annex, one on the south end, and one in Oak Harbor,” Sinclair said. “Because we have more, number one we’d have backups and number two, if we found that that was not enough, we would be able to accommodate other locations.”

While some counties are selling the vote-by-mail process as a money saver, Sinclair sees it more as a financial wash, albeit with certain advantages.

“What you end up with, in our case, is an election process that is not as vulnerable to error because you don’t have staff essentially trying to run two elections,” she said.

A public hearing will be held Monday at 10:45 a.m. in Coupeville, after which the commissioners could approve the resolution.

“Hopefully it will go forward,” the auditor said.