SANTA BARBARA COUNTY - Santa Barbara County's ballot extractor machine is running at full tilt, separating and processing thousands of vote by mail ballots every hour.
"We've already received over 50,000 vote by mail ballots", says County Elections Chief Joe Holland, "you can see we're processing those as we stand here, this election is already happening."
A small army of county election workers painstakingly examine each and every mailed ballot to ensure there's no duplication or other errors that could invalidate or disqualify the ballot.
"You know vote by mail, every election it goes up", Holland says, "for this election we issued 121,000 vote by mail ballots, four years ago it was 111,000."
With am obvious growing trend toward vote by mail, some suggest maybe its time for cash-strapped counties to conduct all elections by mail, saving millions of taxpayer dollars.
"The possibility for reducing the cost of elections which are a greater concern during tough budgetary times like this", says Cal Poly political science professor Michael Latner, "we need to be looking at fundamental reforms."
While fewer voters are picking up and casting ballots at polling stations, many others still wait until election day to drop off their mail-in ballots.
"I'm in favor of vote by mail because it increases turnout, it makes it easier to vote", Holland says, "but I always want to provide polling places for people to go cast a ballot or drop off a vote by mail ballot."
Some say ultimately technology, and not tradition, will increase voter participation.
"In fact, if we are ready to embrace technology, there are a lot of reforms", Latner says, "including moving to online voting and other forms of collecting data that can substantially reduce costs and are at least as safe as the current systems we use."
"I teach classes to fourth and fifth graders and I ask them what they think about voting by computer", Holland counters, "they list problems like a virus, the computers could be hacked, you could have a power outage, so until we can convince fourth and fifth graders that online voting is a good idea, I don't think we're going to see it anytime soon."
With more than a third of registered voters across the country voting by mail, some political observers are calling the trend a quiet revolution in America's election system.
