Against early voting

During the 1990s I voted in every election via absentee voting provisions. As I was a college student for the whole decade (undergraduate and graduate school), I was never in my hometown of Rochester, Minnesota for election day. Wishing to remain a voter there, I regularly made provisions for voting absentee. I should note the first time I did this I was a nineteen-year-old college sophomore. I wasn’t particularly knowledgeable or sophisticated, but somehow I managed to take responsibility and get my ballot. In some cases, I managed to get my ballot notarized and sent through the mail.

No one remembers these elections as fraudulent or in some way restrictive of voting. Think of the 1996 election, if you can remember back that far. Was there any sense that large swaths of the American polity were disenfranchised or that voting was unacceptably difficult? There was not. In addition, in those days we managed to count almost all votes in one night and have winners declared with alacrity.

But in recent years most states have incorporated all sorts of provisions to make voting easier. Almost all states, like my current state of South Dakota, allow for easy early voting. We in South Dakota have been able to vote in the November election since September 20. This requires only a short trip to the county courthouse. Some states allow mail-in voting. In Minnesota, for example, you fill out an online form and a ballot will be mailed to you. The website instructions specifically note that you don’t even need to be registered to get a ballot (Minnesota allows voters to register on election day at the polling place. Presumably the mail-in voter will need to get registered before election day for his or her vote to count.)

While the motivation for such ease-of-voting measures is surely laudable, the effects have been largely malign. First, there is little indication that such provisions actually increase turnout. The people who take advantage of early voting are almost entirely people who would vote anyway. In addition, it is all these alternative voting methods that have both slowed down our vote counting and allowed for at least the perception of voter fraud.

Again, let’s look at Minnesota as an example. As I stated, the mail-in-voter need not be registered when filling out his or her ballot. That means when counting said ballots someone needs to check that the voter is registered. Such checks are normally done at the polling place. But with mail-in votes the vote counter has to do it, delaying the count.

There is a great value in getting a vote count quickly and in manner most people can understand. The multiple mechanisms of voting require double-checking all sorts of safety provisions (such as whether signatures on the envelope and ballot of a mailed vote match). The slowness of our counts and the complicated ways in which states must deal with various kinds of ballots (early votes, mail-in votes, day of election votes, regular absentee votes, military votes) undermines our faith in the vote count. One needn’t be a “stop the steal” level election denier to note that all the provisions put in place in 2020 to make voting easier (understandable given COVID) could be seen by reasonable people as allowing an unacceptable opportunity for mischievousness. Think of voter drop boxes. Again, one needn’t be an election fraud alarmist to find problematic the notion of a box, unattended and unmonitored, in which ballots can be dumped and left to sit for hours or days on end. 

With millions of ballots across the country sitting around for weeks, the chance of a mistake being made (such as ballots being misplaced) or outright fraud increases. In some cases, boxes have been misplaced in transportation, and we have witnessed photos of boxes of ballots sitting unattended in cars.

Mail-in-ballots are of course easy to steal. Just as thieves sometimes steal Amazon packages off front door stoops, they can steal ballots out of mailboxes. There are credible stories of nursing home facilities where magically every single resident votes, a highly unlikely outcome. What may be happening is corrupt individuals are taking advantage of senior citizens who are more easily confused or forgetful, absconding with their ballots, and filling them out fraudulently. In addition, mail-in-ballots can be sent to the wrong address or picked up by a resident at that address who is not the voter. In Minnesota, you can sign up to have your ballot automatically mailed to you each election. What if you move and forget to update your address with the election officials?

Naturally there is also the problem of voting for someone and then changing one’s mind due to a news event or further information. States like Minnesota allow for ballot correction, but it is an onerous process, certainly more difficult than making a mistake at the actual polling place. In the latter case, one simply returns to the desk and requests a new ballot. Lickety split.

In my absentee voting days, I once voted for a person who then dropped out of the race. Wasted vote. I imagine all over the country there are voters who are changing their minds on one race or another who, having cast their votes as much as eight weeks before the election, face a high hurdle to changing their vote due to new information.

Finally, let’s not discount the notion of simply fulfilling one’s civic duty. Is it too much to ask that people, in enacting the fundamental act of citizenship, be required to put some effort into it? I mean, you should at least have to get off your couch. If someone is unable to get off the couch (I mean by reason of disability or infirmity of some kind), we used to provide rides to the polling place for such folk.  That is also an expression of citizenship, namely helping one’s less mobile fellow Americans get to the voting booth. I am opposed to all early voting provisions save those of the traditional absentee ballot, intended for those who know they may be absent or busy on election day. I also am in favor of turning election day into a national holiday, letting all non-essential workers have few excuses for not being able to go out and vote.

Again, those of us of a certain age remember elections in bygone days. Few thought that voting practices were overly restrictive. Almost everyone, including dumb college kids like me, could figure out how to vote even in complicated circumstances. We even voted via this thing called paper, which presented no problems to anyone. Lots of people voted. Votes were counted quickly and with relatively little controversy. Early voting mechanisms have done little to increase turnout but have made elections slow and cumbersome while eroding their legitimacy. Like an old man shouting at the clouds, I say end early voting.