Amid the relatively small-scale flap over military absentee ballots in Florida, Americans should not ignore a far more widespread, significant and ominous phenomenon: the skyrocketing use of absentee ballots throughout the country by people who could go to the polls on Election Day. This trend, usually applauded as a means to increase voter participation, is corroding the secret ballot, which is the cornerstone of an honest and lawful vote.

The secret ballot, cast behind a curtain or partition in a public polling place on Election Day, is the single most important element in the electoral system that most Americans trust. Voting by secret ballot prevents spouses from looking over their partners' shoulders while they cast ballots at home; pastors from calling for all parishioners to vote together in church or temple; labor leaders from asking workers to vote together in the union hall; bosses from suggesting employees do the same in the office. It prevents party workers from handing out absentee ballots already filled in with straight tickets, and cajoling their neighbors to sign them and send them in. It makes counting the votes relatively timely and relatively verifiable.

In contrast, elections conducted primarily by absentee or mail-in ballot leave voters vulnerable to all those pressures. A variety of local and state laws prevent blatant electioneering at the polling place, but a move toward widespread absentee voting wipes away such protections and greatly enhances the possibility of outright fraud. Moreover, allowing increasingly large numbers of voters to cast their ballots before Election Day ensures that some of them will miss the information-packed final stretch of the campaign. And a flood of absentee ballots make for an excruciatingly slow tabulation, leaving races unresolved weeks after most of us think we know, or should know, what happened.

Yet we are hurtling down this absentee path at high speed. In 1980, 12 percent of voters in Washington state voted absentee. In 1996, the number had jumped to 35.6 percent. This year, the figure will be about 60 percent. Six percent of California's votes were cast absentee in 1980, but the number jumped to more than 20 percent in 1996 and is expected to reach 30 percent this year. Oregon has gone to a full vote-by-mail system--the equivalent of 100 percent absentee voting. Nationwide, there are estimates that more than 30 percent of this year's vote was cast absentee, compared with the Census Bureau's count of 20 percent in 1996.

Absentee voting has a long and honorable history in our country. During the Civil War, union soldiers were encouraged to vote by absentee ballot. In 1896, states began extending the practice to civilians who were away from home on Election Day. But the absentee ballot has expanded far beyond its original purpose. We should restore it to its traditional status--as an occasional exception to voting in person, rather than as a permanent substitute.

Election officials, understandably, encourage absentee voting. Besides offering the hope of higher turnouts, it cuts down on long voter lines, and--most important for the financially pressed county and municipal officials who actually stage elections--it reduces the amount of voting equipment that needs to be moved into polling places and the number of people needed to oversee the process.

Democratic and Republican party officials have supported this trend, but for less disinterested reasons. The use of absentee ballots allows party workers to identify certain voters who might need "assistance" (in some states this year, the parties applied for the ballots on the behalf of some voters and then helped them complete the form, sign it and mail it) and it simplifies their get-out-the-vote efforts.

The parties' enthusiasm, however, points toward a darker prospect: a return to the corruption that permeated 19th-century American politics. In those days, ballots were not standardized locally. Voters could--and usually did--use color-keyed or specially shaped straight tickets printed up by party bosses. Huge numbers of votes were cast fraudulently, with people voting two or three times, and otherwise padding the rolls and counts.

The system hit its nadir in the notoriously tainted 1884 presidential election in which Grover Cleveland defeated James Blaine. The vote was dominated by charges of ballot tampering and other electoral irregularities. In its aftermath, a series of good-government reforms were enacted--including the adoption, state by state, of the so-called Australian ballot (so named because it was devised there in 1856). This was a uniform ballot offering multiple candidates choices and designed to be cast in secret.

Illegal or coerced voting was dramatically reduced (as was reported voter turnout). Pockets of corrupt machine politics have certainly remained and surfaced from time to time, but for the past century, serious fraud in American politics has been rare. But we should not take our basically fair elections for granted.

A confession is in order here: I vote absentee.

That's because I live in Maryland but have spent every Election Day since 1982 in New York City working for a television network. I appreciate the convenience of the absentee vote. But I don't use it for primaries and local elections, I don't let anyone obtain a ballot for me, and I would never use it if I were not actually away from home on Election Day. I believe in the process of standing with my neighbors at my polling place--shielded by a zone of protection against electioneering--and then exercising in private my precious individual right to vote.

For those of us who must vote absentee, I think the process should entail enough difficulty that only those intent on voting will pursue it. For most of this century, that's how it went: Citizens seeking an absentee ballot had to affirm, often by signed affidavit, that they could not be physically present at their polling place.

That changed in the 1960s. As mobility became a fact of contemporary society, high standards for absentee ballots began to relax in many states. Most still required a statement that the voter would be away on Election Day, but in the '80s even that standard began to fray. Today, many states, including California, North Carolina, Washington and Florida, proudly advertise how easy it is to obtain and cast a quick ballot. The Web site of Henderson County, N.C., refers to its process as "no-excuse one-stop absentee voting."

This method creates immense potential for abuse--and Florida, in particular, has been a showcase for it. The most spectacular instance was the Miami mayoral election of 1997. Many absentee ballots were shown to be forged, coerced, stolen from mailboxes or fraudulently obtained. The Florida courts overturned the election in March 1998, removing Xavier Suarez from office and installing Joe Carollo instead. And absentee ballot irregularities in the 1993 Hialeah mayoral contest led a Florida judge to order a new election.

Cases like these prompted Florida to pass the stringent requirements for absentee votes--clear postmarks, signatures, dates, voter identification numbers, witnesses--that have tripped up so many absentee ballots in the current brouhaha. Not only are some of the military ballots at issue; in Seminole County, Republican Party workers are accused of inappropriately adding voter identification numbers to thousands of absentee ballot applications that had been set aside for failing to meet the state's requirements.

Even if ways are found to reduce or eliminate the problems of reliability that plague absentee voting, other headaches remain. Creating a system where a large number of people can vote long before Election Day changes the whole nature of a campaign. For better or worse, most citizens don't pay close attention to a race until shortly before the election; understandably, the candidates aim the heart of their message toward those final days and weeks. In the home stretch, revelations often emerge, changing the context of the election or the voters' evaluation of the candidates. So those early voters are, by definition, comparatively uninformed.

Just as significant, the current election underscores an embarrassing reality of widespread absentee voting--the counting takes too long. Votes that come in by mail take more time to arrive, more time to open, more time to verify, and more time to count. It took more than two weeks for county election officials in Washington state to count hundreds of thousands of absentee ballots, leaving its critical Senate contest in limbo. "Final" returns gave Democrat Maria Cantwell a 1,953-vote lead, triggering an automatic machine recount that will take at least another week. In Oregon's universal vote-by-mail system, where all ballots had to be received by the close of business on Election Day, it took well over a week to determine who had carried the state's seven electoral votes. And in California, where more than 1 million voters cast absentee ballots, nearly 200,000 remained uncounted Friday.

The absentee ballot revolution is changing the nature of voting in America. It is bringing increased participation, but at the risk of increased skulduggery. Now is the time, as this chaotic election inspires a broader discussion of the electoral system, to begin a counterrevolution, educating people about the true costs of this fad.