Yes, it’s still October but Louisianans can cast a ballot in
the November election at early voting locations, with some parishes having
multiple sites, through the 30th.
Thirty-two states plus the District of Columbia allow early voting,
which includes every state west of the Mississippi River but Missouri and
Minnesota.
Oregon and Washington State don’t even have an actual
election day as all voting is conducted by mail, which saves money but provides
the greatest opportunities for election fraud.
Early voting is a bonanza for political machines, which
don’t engage in convincing so much as hauling and perhaps providing
under-the-table incentives along the way- food, booze, cigarettes or cash- for
their electoral bounty.
Election Day is supposed to be when the decision is made,
not just revealed. Furthermore, there
have been instances where a candidate had won on Election Day but lost because
his opponent ran up the score in early voting.
Early voting benefits political consultants, incumbents and
well-funded candidates.
Because of early voting campaigns have to sustain a high
level of media expenditures for weeks and must invest in a protracted GOTV
operation rather than focus their resources on a single day.
Early voting in Arizona for the 2012 presidential election
began on October 11th, 26 days before Election Day. If you had voted the morning early voting
started, you would have cast a ballot prior to the vice-presidential debate
(which was that evening) and two of the three presidential debates.
According to the National Association of Secretaries of
State, the battleground state of Iowa along with four other states opened early
voting in September, before any of the presidential debates were held.
The day before early voting began in Iowa, a Public Policy
Polling survey had ex-Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney at 44%, 7 points
behind the president. The week after
the first debate between the major parties’ nominees, a Rasmussen poll had
Romney down in Iowa only by 2 points.
Apparently Iowans had learned something about the candidates in that
timeframe to cause a significant shift in the polls.
While there are people who knew they were going to vote for
President Obama’s re-election in 2012 as early as November 5, 2008 (the day
after he won) just as there were plenty of voters who were itching to vote for
the fill-in-the-name Republican candidate before Obama had taken his oath of
office, states should not encourage people to vote for president before they’ve
at least had an opportunity to see them defend their records and articulate
their agendas in a debate.
Voting too early is like being a juror who renders a verdict
in a trial after missing half the evidence and testimony.
There should be provisions in state election laws to ensure
the handicapped, servicemen and women and those who work away from home have
their voices heard and their votes counted.
Having thirty “election days” is unnecessary and opens the
door for negative unintended consequences, from vote hauling by professional
GOTV organizations to inviting people to make uninformed decisions before the
maximum amount of information has been presented.
Ideally, the eve of Election Day should be a time of
reflection and contemplation about where we are and where we need to be as a
country, state and community.
I’d wager that Americans have spent more time playing Angry
Birds than thinking about candidates for the US Senate- the legislative body
that confirms cabinet secretaries and federal judges and ratifies
treaties.
The arguments for early voting have merit, mainly providing
for convenient civic participation by allowing people to “get it out of the
way” and reducing crowds at voting locations.
But early voting’s virtues are outweighed by its drawbacks:
vote hauling, driving up the costs of campaigns and “early voter’s remorse”.
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