Early Voting: For the Good or Ill of Election Integrity?
Early voting makes elections more convenient, but does it encourage people to cast votes absent information that may later be uncovered, making them rue the choices they made prematurely?
There are roughly one-hundred days between now and the election (ninety-eight as of this writing). But the first votes will be cast much sooner than that. For Pennsylvania, Michigan and North Carolina, early voting begins in September.
These are perennial battleground states; it’s hard to forge a path to electoral college success without carrying at least one of these states. (Larry Sabato’s Crystal Ball ranks Pennsylvania a tossup and Michigan and North Carolina as “lean Democrat,” while the Cook Political Report rates North Carolina a toss up and rates Pennsylvania and Michigan lean Democrat.)
It’s good strategy, then, for candidates to focus their attentions on such states. But early-voting truncates the period in which this can be done. And that can exacerbate some fundamental inequalities of campaigns, which frequently see campaigns focus on areas whose electoral college votes promise big payoffs, while ignoring states who contribute less to the 270-vote total a candidate needs to win.
If there’s a shorter period of time in which to vie for what could be a quintessential state, then logic dictates candidates focus even more of there time and energy on these narrow arenas.
(But placing blame for the unequal attention candidates pay to the electorate cannot be laid at the feet of the electoral college. If presidential elections were settled by the popular vote, it’s highly likely similar practices would still exist: big urban areas would offer greater electoral payoffs for candidates than rural ones, meaning candidates would likely focus their campaigns on places with high population density.)
There have always been good cases against expansive early voting: is an election really “fair” when one person casts his or her vote months ahead of everyone else? These days the political news cycle is approximately an hour, sometimes less than that. Consider that a hundred days ago—roughly the time between now and the election—George Floyd, whose murder by police sparked off a still-evolving wave of peaceful protests and violent riots, was alive. Imagine casting a vote only to have an event such as Floyd’s death completely subsume the political landscape, sparking off nationwide dialogues on criminal justice reform and issues like qualified immunity. This is hardly the kind of subject discussed by nightly-news panels, who wade only into the shallows of complex areas of political substance, and likely unknown to many people prior to late May/early June.
The point is this: it’s impossible to believe that new information and the responses of candidates to burgeoning political issues doesn’t affect the voting calculus of the average citizen.
Late-breaking events are the stuff political destiny is made of. Take the 2012 election, when Superstorm Sandy’s path of devastation gave President Obama a rare opportunity to flex the muscles of executive incumbency. Wall-to-wall news coverage showed the then-president traveling to hard-hit areas, consoling distraught citizens of New York and New Jersey and marshalling the forces of the federal government to move swiftly to provide succor. The greatest campaign manager in the world couldn’t organize an event that better argued for a candidate’s capacity to govern sagely.
What’s more, Obama was shown working side-by-side with Chris Christie, then the Republican governor of New Jersey. It’s impossible to prove, of course, but it’s likely that the amiability between Democrat Obama and Republican Christie was the final nail in the coffin for Mitt Romney’s campaign: you can’t buy better press than the implicit endorsement of a prominent office-holding member of the opposing political party, which the relationship between Obama and Christie seemed to connote.
The problem with early voting is the extended period of time between the opening and closing of voting means on-the-ground political realities can change and this may influence the choices people make and the way they ultimately decide to cast their votes. But, once cast, there aren’t any retractions.
Now, determining what kind of “influences” ultimately shape an election—and whether these “influences” are undue or benign—is no easy task. Elections, after all, are predicated on inequality: a victor only emerges because he or she garnered a larger percentage of the vote than any of the other candidates.
And there are an infinite number of ways in which a voting rationale can be constructed. For many people it’s a question of whether the incumbent has done a satisfactory job: a vote in the affirmative is a vote for the current office holder; a vote in the negative is a vote for the other candidate. Remember, too, that state and local ballot issues, which commingle with federal candidates, can affect voter turnout and the mindset with which people enter their polling place. And, then, of course, there is the vanishingly rare subset of people who are ideological voters.
And this just begins to scratch the surface of rationales that motivate voter behavior. Elections really do come down to the individual: majorities, after all, are constructed by the nature of the members that make them up.
When there are a million different ways to account for support for a candidate, how do you objectively measure undue influences on elections? Short of ironclad evidence of voter tampering, a la the political machines of the 19th century, or of tampering with voting machines, it’s hard to pin down what “undue” influences look like. Even people who fall on the extreme fringes of the political spectrum and who are motivated by disinformation and propaganda have genuine motivations in the way they make up their mind: they have chosen in what they wish to believe.
It could, then, be argued that politicians who complain about “stolen” elections are themselves appropriating the voice of voters by labelling certain voting rationales they find personally contemptible as invalid.
So, is early voting an undue influence on elections or not?
A lot of that depends on the purpose of early voting, which serves primarily to make election day more convenient. Not everyone—the elderly, the ill, those who hold hourly jobs—can afford to stand in line, potentially for hours, on election day. The rationale for early voting seems particularly strong this year: when the crowds that tend to amass around polling places are a vector for a potentially-deadly virus, it seems prudent to divert people away from them.
Early voting allows people to vote at their convenience, at times that fit into their lives and away from the epidemiological dangers posed by large crowds.
Democratic systems, after all, exist to serve the will of the people. Voting is about expressing preferences and reaffirming the sovereignty of the individual voice.
But, in a similar vein, if voting is such an important keystone of democratic representation, should voting, which American culture tends to foolishly and unduly emphasize as the primary means of political participation, really be that easy?
If not just rights but the responsibly of exercising them is so fundamental to democracy, should the activity of voting really fit so neatly into your day? Or should it be something that requires more time, in which the weight of the decision to be made is given more attention?
After all, although one’s vote is ultimately an expression affirming and broadcasting one’s one opinion, it’s amplified across the electorate and its result has consequences that affect others.
Though early voting is convenient, though it engenders a certain amount of adaptability into democracy, which one might ultimately carries a great deal of populist merit, it does run the risk of short-circuiting the weightiness of an election: it enables the premature casting of ballots, enabling people to make a decision they may, as political events unfold and evolve, come to regret.
Objectively, is early voting a good or ill for elections? On the whole, it’s hard to say. Like so much that affects American politics, there is no single summary judgment of objective good or ill that can be made and applied without qualification to each member of the electorate. So much of morality in the American political system is relative: it changes from individual to individual, dependent on the determinations each person makes about what actions and decisions are best placed to orient their lives towards the good they find most compelling.