By Christie Thompson, ProPublica

In his State of the Union address, President Obama returned to a point he'd made on election night: The need to do something about long voting lines. Obama announced his plan for a commission to "improve the voting experience in America."

But often missing from discussions about how to make voting easier is the rapid expansion of absentee balloting. Letting people vote from home means fewer people queuing up at overburdened polling places. So why hasn't vote-by-mail been heralded as the solution?

When it comes to absentee and mail-in voting, researchers and voting rights advocates aren't sure the convenience is worth the potential for hundreds of thousands of rejected ballots.

Although Oregon and Washington are the only two states to conduct elections entirely by mail, absentee voting has expanded rapidly nationwide. Since 1980, the number of voters using absentee ballots has more than tripled. Roughly one in five votes is now absentee.

Twenty-seven states and the District of Columbia allow voters to request an absentee ballot for any reason, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. That's up from the six states that did so in 1988, according to the Pew Charitable Trusts.

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Liberals are leading the pack, Libyan officials said one day after the country held its first free elections in decades. “Early reports show that the coalition is leading the polls in the majority of constituencies,” said an official from the National Forces Alliance, a liberal coalition, as votes were tallied around the country. Leaders from the Islamist Justice and Construction Party acknowledged the lead gathered by liberals, but said it was “a tight race of us in the south.” Liberals held a strong lead in and around Tripoli, where most of the country’s population is concentrated.

[Via]