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The Case Against Early Voting
By EUGENE KONTOROVICH and JOHN MCGINNIS
January 28, 2014
To the delight of anyone who’s ever waited in line to cast a vote, a
bipartisan election commission convened by President Barack Obama concluded
last
week that states across the country should increase their use of early
voting.
_www.politico.com_ (http://www.politico.com)
As the Presidential Commission on Election Administration notes in its _new
report_
(https://www.supportthevoter.gov/files/2014/01/Amer-Voting-Exper-final-draft-01-09-14-508.pdf)
, “no excuse” early voting — meaning it is
open even to those who don’t qualify for an absentee ballot — has grown
rapidly in recent decades in what the commission called a “quiet revolution.”
In the 2012 election, almost one-third of ballots were cast early — more
than double those cast in 2000 — and 32 states now permit the practice,
allowing citizens to vote an average of 19 days before Election Day.
The commission rightly notes that early voting has its advantages for
individual voters — not just avoiding long lines, but in many cases also
getting
to vote on weekends without having to miss work or school. But early
voting run amok is bad for democracy. The costs to collective self-governance
—
which the report refers to only in passing, in a single sentence —
substantially outweigh the benefits. Instead of expanding the practice, we
should
use this moment as an opportunity to establish clear limits on it before it
becomes the norm.
Why? For all its conveniences, early voting threatens the basic nature of
citizen choice in democratic, republican government. In elections,
candidates make competing appeals to the people and provide them with the
information necessary to be able to make a choice. Citizens also engage with
one
another, debating and deliberating about the best options for the country.
Especially in an age of so many nonpolitical distractions, it is important to
preserve the space of a general election campaign — from the early kickoff
rallies to the last debates in October — to allow voters to think through,
together, the serious issues that face the nation.
The integrity of that space is broken when some citizens cast their ballots
as early as 46 days before the election, as some states allow. A lot can
happen in those 46 days. Early voters are, in essence, asked a different set
of questions from later ones; they are voting with a different set of
facts. They may cast their ballots without the knowledge that comes from later
candidate debates (think of the all-important Kennedy-Nixon debates, which
ran from late September 1960 until late October); without further media
scrutiny of candidates; or without seeing how they respond to unexpected
national or international news events — the proverbial “October surprise.” The
2008 election, for example, could have ended differently had many voters
cast their ballots before the massive economic crisis that followed the
collapse of Lehman Brothers that September. Similarly, candidates often seek
to
delay the release of embarrassing information, or the implementation of
difficult policies, until after votes have been cast. A wave of votes starting
months before the election date makes this easier.
Early voting not only limits the set of information available to voters; to
the extent that it decreases the importance of debates, it might also
systematically help incumbents and quasi-incumbents like vice presidents, who
generally have the advantage of having been in the public eye longer.
More fundamentally, early voting changes what it means to vote. It is well
known that voters can change their minds — polls always go up and down
during a campaign season. A single Election Day creates a focal point that
gives solemnity and relevance to the state of popular opinion at a particular
moment in time; on a single day, we all have to come down on one side or the
other. But if the word “election” comes to mean casting votes over a
period of months, it will elide the difference between elections and polls.
People will be able to vote when the mood strikes them — after seeing an
inflammatory ad, for example. Voting then becomes an incoherent summing of how
various individuals feel at a series of moments, not how the nation feels at
a particular moment. This weakens civic cohesiveness, and it threatens to
substitute raw preferences and momentary opinion for rational deliberation.
Of course, those eager to cast early will be the most ideological — but
these are precisely the voters who would benefit most from taking in the full
back and forth of the campaign.
Moreover, there are other ways of achieving some of the benefits of early
voting, such as old-fashioned absentee ballots or setting up more polling
places. Even a limited few-days-early voting period could convey most of the
advantages of the practice while limiting the most severe democratic costs.
Early voting is a matter of degree: Even Election “Day” lets people cast
ballots at different times. But at the moment, there is no upper bound at
all on the growing practice, and the president’s commission made no mention
of such an option. With the group’s report opening a new round of discussion
over voting policy, now is the time to consider whether the “quiet
revolution” of early voting has gone too far.
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Centroids: The Center of the Radical Centrist Community
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Radical Centrism website and blog: http://RadicalCentrism.org
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