Two for the price of one sale. Along with voter ID, we get any voter will be able to cast an absentee ballot, via mail, 45 days before an election.

From today's AJC Political Insider:

And you thought advance voting changed politics in Georgia

The decision by the Legislature to require all voters to show a photo ID has stirred up a dust storm that has obscured other parts of the measure — which may have an even greater impact on politics in Georgia.

Should Gov. Sonny Perdue sign the bill — and there's no reason to believe he won't — any voter will be able to cast an absentee ballot, via mail, 45 days before an election. This is in addition to the five days of early, in-person balloting now in place the week before a vote.

We've moving closer and closer to Oregon's system of a mail-based election spread over weeks rather than concentrated on a single day. But unlike Oregon, the state of Georgia won't automatically mail every voter a ballot.
Absentee ballots will require no excuse, but will have to be requested by a voter. And for the first time, special interest groups — the National Rifle Association, the Christian Coalition, and the AFL-CIO — will be able to include absentee ballot requests in their mass mailings.

The entire culture of electioneering will be rattled by this. Get-out-the-vote efforts will have to be sustained for weeks. TV ads will be launched earlier, and air-time will have to be sustained longer. Dirty tricks will have to come earlier.

Door-to-door operations will consist of two waves. First, campaign volunteers will be assigned to help voters fill out a form requesting an absentee ballot. They'll even take on the cost of mailing it — if they suspect the voter has the proper state of mind.

Then those same volunteers will come back and help the voter fill it out. And perhaps offer to mail the ballot, too.

This raises natural concerns about fraud, but voters will nonetheless like it, said political observers we talked to Wednesday. "The one group it doesn't benefit is candidates. They'll think this is going to make elections more expensive for them," said GOP consultant Clint Austin. And it might.

"From a campaign perspective, it's very hard," said Judithanne Scourfield-McLauchlan, an assistant professor at the University of South Florida in St. Petersburg. She ran the Gore campaign in Oregon in 2000, the first presidential campaign by mail.

"The thing I liked about it was how it increased voter turnout," Scourfield-McLauchlan said. Oregon turnout now approaches 80 percent, she said. Not far from the participation level in countries where voting is mandated.