Less accurate, but slower and more expensive.

To add to Eric's points below, we won't know the outcome of close races for days(weeks?). Unfortunately, Sam Reed is feeding the media two implausible explanations for the anticipated delay. Doubly unfortunate, the media are leaving Reed's absurd claims unchallenged:

(1) King County's vote will be slowed down because we still have polling sites.

(2) If only the law were changed to require all ballots to be received by election day (not just mailed on election day) we'd have our results on time.

Both purported explanations are sheer nonsense and easily refutable. That Sam Reed would make such claims implies that either he doesn't know his rear end from a hole in the ground, or he is outright lying.

The reality is that processing mail ballots is far more time-consuming and labor and capital intensive than administering polling sites. (To see how elaborate and complex of an operation is needed to process mail ballots, see my detailed trip report of my visit to the King County mail ballot facility after the Nov. '06 election). It's mail balloting as such that's the problem, certainly with King County's existing antiquated infrastructure. The throughput of the system simply isn't high enough to count the votes faster. Polling places ballots have historically been counted and reported on election night or the next morning. If the same number of ballots came in as mail ballots, it would take several extra days to process them all. And the processing bottleneck dominates the late arrival of mailed-in ballots. Requiring that all ballots be received by election day would only impose an additional inconvenience on voters in order to create a larger upfront backlog that would still take several days to work through.

To see the actual numbers, go visit King County's Election News Archive from, say, the 2007 general election. If you walk through the various "Ballot Counting" press releases, you can see how many ballots they processed each day. 106,000 poll ballots were cast and 99+% were reported the morning after election day. Compared with this (and these numbers are arrived at from different figures in multiple press releases), 353,000 mail ballots were cast. 171,000 had been received before election day, most of which, by state law, were preprocessed before the election but not tabulated. 145,000 of these ballots were tabulated and reported on election night. At the end of election day, they had a backlog of 92,000 uncounted mail ballots. Over the next several days, they reported counting the following numbers of mail-in ballots:

Wed -- 17,783

Thu -- 17,310

Fri -- 38,832

Sat -- 35,524

Sun -- 27,639

In other words, they didn't get through the pile of mail ballots that were on hand on election day until mid-day Saturday. Average throughput for the post election week last year - 27,000 mail ballots a day.

Bear in mind that King County's turnout for this election is expected to be more than double the turnout of the November 2007 election -- about 700,000 mail ballots and 300,000 poll ballots. If the throughput is still 27,000 mail ballots a day, it would take at least 13 entire days to process and count the mail ballots (net of pre-election preprocessing of early returned ballots). If the polling places were closed, and the same number of ballots were replaced by mail ballots, it would take an additional 11 days for those 300,000 ballots to go through the existing infrastructure. That's why Ron Sims had to back down on his dream of a mail-only election. He couldn't make it work. The polling places were his only lifeline to get all the votes counted, period.

Now, the recent news reports claim that King County expects to count 100,000 mail ballots a day for the first several days after the election. I'll believe it when I see it. They've never achieved that level of throughput, at least not since I've been paying attention. Look through their news archives. There was one day of 99,000 ballots in November '04. I find nothing close to that since. The 27,000 per-day throughput of last year is slower than normal, and is probably a symptom of a serious technology problem which they didn't wish to disclose to the public. What are they doing differently this year than they've done in the past in order to justify the claim they will get to 100,000 ballots a day? News reports don't say.

In reality, there are only three distinct ways to get an earlier vote count:
1) reinstate polling places
2) spend obscene amounts of money on mail-ballot infrastructure and operating labor
3) Require/pressure voters to vote earlier than in other states, depriving the Washington electorate of late-breaking information.

Against the interests of voters, Sam Reed is pushing (2) and (3)

[Referenced articles: Sam Reed told us in this news release, that King County's polling sites will slow down the count. This canard was repeated by the Associated Press on Oct. 23, and by Seattle P-I yesterday. The AP article also repeated Reed's nonsense about requiring ballots to be returned by election day

Sam Reed also suckered Joni Balter into writing this piece. The Everett Herald is falling for it too]