Rethinking Early Voting

Early voting is not the real problem with our elections.

Donald Trump and many of his supporters advocate abolishing early voting.  They want Election Day to be great again and not Election Month.  Trump went further and advised his supporters to vote on Election Day, not to early vote.  I can understand their point.  Early voting does expand opportunities for rigging and fraud such as vote buying; there is more time for it.  However after this election and in the midst of the [insert impolite words of your choice] counting of ballots in Arizona and Nevada, this former election judge thinks Republicans would be wise to embrace early voting.

For a tactic of long standing among some Democrats is Election Day voter suppression — yes, the very thing they so love accusing Republicans of doing.  That tactic is now even more problematic for Republicans since the Election Day vote has become far more red than early voting and especially mail-in voting.   

In Maricopa County, Arizona, machines around the county went down on Election Day resulting in long lines.  No telling how many gave up on voting.  If Kari Lake does not become governor, that will be a significant factor.  In Harris County, Texas, a number of Republican precincts ran out of paper ballots on Election Day even though election judges pleaded for more of them as they saw they were running out.  This helped narrowly re-elect an odious tyrant, Lina Hidalgo (D, of course), as County Judge.

So, yes, Trump’s advice to his supporters to vote on Election Day turned out to be bad advice as it made them vulnerable to such convenient and predicable “accidents.”

If Republicans would embrace early voting (as I have — it’s been decades since I’ve election day voted), they would be less vulnerable to such Election Day voter suppression and less vulnerable to Election Day incompetence, whether planned or not.  Not to mention that early voting avoids risks of weather, health, and other unexpected Election Day problems.

Again, I am not at all saying early voting is perfect. But two far bigger problems are no-ID voting and mass not-in-person voting, namely mass mail-in voting and drop box voting.

Republicans should insist all states require ID to vote.  Especially now that few are required to vote in one’s neighborhood precinct — that is so last century — voter impersonation is easy to do if ID is not required.  That is one method that raises the dead to vote.

As for mass mail-in voting and drop boxes, these are an invitation to mass election fraud, which in all likelihood is what we got in 2020 and perhaps again this year.   I have personally experienced how difficult it is to verify the authenticity of mail-in votes with even a small batch.  Republicans should outlaw mail-in voting except for military and perhaps a very few other cases.  Drop boxes have similar problems and enable ballot harvesting (which should also be outlawed), literal ballot box stuffing and vote buying along with no telling how many outright fake votes.

Outlawing mass mail-in voting and drop boxes would have to be done at the federal level as several key states will not do so.  So be it.  Yes, the Constitution gives the states power over running elections, but that is not a carte blanche to rig elections.  Both Congress and the federal courts have intervened in election law in the past.  And the current justified distrust in mail-in voting and drop boxes cries out for federal intervention.

In short, states and the federal government should insist voting be in person and verified by ID with very few exceptions such as military. That is the presenting issue with our elections, not early voting.

Yes, I realize that this coming semi-legitimate Congress is unlikely to do what needs to be done to protect elections, and Joe Biden would veto it anyway.  So I fear for the 2024 elections.  I fear for any country incapable of conducting a fair clean election, which is what we have become thanks to the normalization of mail-in and drop box voting in 2020.