A woman we know said that during a recent two-hour stretch, three separate political operatives from two different so-called 527 organizations – tax-exempt political action committees organized under Chapter 527 of the tax code that can accept the soft-money contributions that official parties are prohibited from taking under the 2002 McCain-Feingold campaign-finance law – stopped at her South Side home and offered absentee ballot request forms.

As political campaigns increasingly rely on absentee vptomg, the Norman Rockwell image of Americans doing their civic duty at the polls on Election Day is quickly fading. More than half the states have relaxed their absentee- and early-voting regulations, and one state, Oregon, votes entirely by mail under a system designed to increase voter participation. In a nation that sends only about half of the electorate to the polls, it’s reassuring that groups and states are working to reverse the dismal trend toward voter apathy. America Coming Together, one of the most recognizable of the 527 groups, claims that about half of the absentee ballot requests it has fielded have come from people who haven’t voted more than once in the last seven years.

But therein also lies the problem, especially in a battleground state like Iowa, where pundits say Democrat Al Gore was pushed into the win column in 2000 by a flurry of absentee ballots. When political fortunes are won and lost on absentee ballots, the tactics used by the 527 groups come under a microscope, especially in Iowa, which has one of the most user-friendly early-vote systems in the country. No verifying signatures by a witness or notary public are required, as they are in half the states.

Suspicion of the 527 groups increased last week during what was already an embarrassing time for Iowa. Errors on absentee ballots were discovered in Northwest Iowa, where hundreds of Plymouth County voters received ballots that omitted the U.S. House District 5 race, and in Southeast Iowa, where the name of a judge up for retention was left off ballots in four counties. Iowa Secretary of State Chet Culver, a Democrat already under fire from high-profile Republicans like U.S. Sen. Charles Grassley and Iowa House Speaker Christopher Rants for using tax money to mail absentee ballot request forms to every registered voter in the state, hired a proofreader to help alleviate some of the problems, but a pall already had been cast over the integrity of the election.

However the issue of the 527 groups is finally resolved, increased voter education and access in elections shouldn’t be casualties.