Voting by mail isn’t just for absentees anymore.

Hundreds of regular folks — far from being stationed overseas, called out of town for work or drawn to tropical locales on vacation — are lining up to cast ballots in November’s general election by mail.

“It’s a convenient way to vote,” said Patty Jaimes, Douglas County clerk.

And the evidence is piling up in her office at the county courthouse.

A month before the deadline arrives for requesting a ballot by mail, Jaimes already has received 1,988 such applications.

“And that’s not including the big stack that came in today,” Jaimes said Tuesday, expecting the pace to pick up even more during the weeks ahead. “I would imagine we could have anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 ballots sent out.”

If her predictions ring true, the amount would eclipse advance voting totals from the 2000 presidential election. That year the county had 4,837 people vote in advance of Election Day, both by mail and in person at the courthouse.

The mail option is especially attractive to political campaigns, whose operatives spend the weeks and months leading up to Election Day trying to convince their supporters to go to the polls.

Bringing the polls to the voters — especially weeks ahead of time — can ease burdens on campaign workers, said Julie Merz, campaign manager for U.S. Rep. Dennis Moore, D-Kan.

“What it does for us: That’s fewer voters we have to mobilize on Election Day,” Merz said. “We will know, on Election Day, who’s already voted or already requested an advance ballot, and we won’t have to worry about calling them. It helps.”

But voting by mail can lead to concerns.

John Greene, who lives in Dessau, Germany, called Jaimes last week to complain that his absentee ballot didn’t include a blank envelope that would help preserve his anonymity.

Since Jaimes started overseeing the county’s elections in 1981, all mail ballots — previously dubbed “absentee” ballots — have been mailed along with one envelope for returning the ballot. The return envelope includes the voter’s name and a line for a signature, to verify that the qualified voter actually filled out the ballot.

Greene would prefer to have a second, so-called “blind” envelope to carry his votes.

“I think we have a serious problem,” Greene said by phone Tuesday from Germany. “It means, essentially, that my ballot isn’t secret.”

Jaimes said that the signed envelopes holding ballots sent in by mail — from Greene and others — are used to verify each voter’s identity. After that, the envelopes are opened by members of a three-person Advance Board.

The ballots then are placed in a ballot box and counted — anonymously — along with other ballots on Election Night.

“He does have a valid point: If somebody wanted to know how he voted, there’s a possibility they could,” said Jaimes, who emphasized that board members do not look at ballots once envelopes are opened. “This is the first time this has ever come up.”

Jaimes does not plan to make any changes to the vote-by-mail procedures prior to the Nov. 2 election.