The Stench of Early Voting

I'm going to be voting this week, not next week.  My State allows that sort of thing for a couple weeks or so prior to the actual Election Day.  That, of course, does not change the fact that I am quite opposed to the concept, and while I'm fine with the absentee ballot concept, properly regulated, I am of a mind that Election Day is Election Day, not Election Month or (apparently in California, since half their votes have already been submitted) Election Year.

I wrote about something like this a couple years back, here.  My contention was, and is, that there is a problem with a misaligned system that allows returns from one state to be announced while other states are still voting.  So that was the point of the earlier piece.  This one is about the start of voting.

My point then was that, allowing for true absentee ballots (disabled, military, etc.) there was no reason we could not confine voting to a full, astronomical 24-hour window in all states and in DC, starting and ending at the same moment.  No matter where you worked, you could find a spot in the window to get off your butt and go cast your ballot (as had been done for centuries).  To be honest, only the media would be hurt, as they wouldn't have your rapt attention for hours as new states got to the end of their polling times and they could "call" states for this or that candidate.

And it is "news" that is the reason for putting a halt to this absurd early voting.  I mean, if people only needed to be counted based on party affiliation, we wouldn't need to vote.  The same country, though, that elected Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Barack Obama and two George Bushes obviously is reactive to external information and changes its mind.

Believe it or not, that can happen within two weeks of an election, as illustrated by the potential impact of the reopening of the Hillary Clinton criminal investigation by the FBI.  In fact, I promise you as sure as I'm sitting here that the Clinton mafia will be tripping all over themselves to dump some new incriminating stuff on Donald Trump this week to try to take the edge off her possible indictment.  You heard it here first, if it hasn't already happened.

I'm sorry, but if you can have releases of potentially game-changing news a week before an election, there's a real problem with people out there having already voted and potentially wishing they could change their ballot.  Now, I have no sympathy for them.  Their convenience cost them the opportunity to cast an informed ballot.

We need to rip apart this whole scattershot approach to the franchise of the ballot.  Legitimate absentee requirements aside -- and that's a tiny percentage -- I think we can all make plans within a nationwide 24-hour window to get our butts to the polling place and take advantage of the gift given us by our Founders, and that should be treasured by us as much as it was by the post-Saddam Iraqis walking around with proudly empurpled thumbs.

Let's all elevate the value of our vote and get the national election times shrunk to the one day it should be.

Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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