Ah, pulling that lever...

As a child, I vividly remember tagging along with my parents to their voting precinct, entering the booth alongside my dad, watching him cast his vote, and being thrilled when my mom let me wear her “I voted” sticker. The entire process seemed so powerful, so symbolic—a chance to have a say in our country’s policies and history.

As an adult, I can’t think of a single moment when I feel more patriotic and more alive as an American than when I pull that lever on Election Day. (Wait, maybe one other moment: watching the changing of the guard at Arlington National Cemetery).

So while I completely understand the necessity for early and absentee voting, I could relate to conservative George F. Will’s thoughts on the fading away of Election Day.

A few nuggets:

Seven presidential elections ago, in 1980, only 5 percent of the votes were cast before what really was Election Day. If this year, like 2004, produces an increase in early voting, close to 30 percent of the votes will have been cast before Nov. 4. In some states, more than 30 percent will have been. In at least five states, a majority of the votes will be cast early, including the swing states of New Mexico (51 percent early in 2004) and Nevada (53 percent). In Washington state, it will be more than 70 percent. In Oregon, which for a decade has voted entirely by mail, the figure will be virtually 100 percent. ...

So what is wrong with early voting? Even leaving aside the large matter of increased potential for fraud in voting by absentee ballots, there are two costs to early voting.

First, for tens of millions of early voters, the campaign process of informing and persuading is effectively truncated. Now, there is evidence that early voters are more partisan and informed than other voters and hence are less likely than the rest of the electorate to be swayed by events late in an election season. Nevertheless, early voting increasingly affects the rhythms of campaigns, forcing the front-loading of arguments. ...

The second problem with early voting is that one of its supposed benefits is actually a subtraction from civic health. The benefit is that it makes voting easier—indeed, essentially effortless. But surely the quality of the electoral turnout declines when the quantity is increased by "convenience voting." ...

The great national coming-together that Election Day has been and should be is a rare communitarian moment in this nation of increasingly inwardly turned individualists who are plugged into their iPods or lost in reveries with their iPhones. It is one thing, and an admirable thing, to privatize airports, turnpikes and many other government entities and operations; it is not admirable to scatter to private spaces, and over many weeks, the supreme act of collective public choice. The coming of the public into public places for the peaceful allocation of public power should be an exhilarating episode in our civic liturgy.

With political excitement at an amazing boil this year, election officials in some communities are hoping that a surge of early voting will reduce the possibility that unusually heavy turnouts on Nov. 4 will cause local polling mechanisms to buckle under the strain. Good grief. Has the approach of Election Day—the fact that 2008 is divisible by four—taken these officials by surprise?

Elections are government projects, so perhaps it is utopian to expect them to be well run. Still, it is time for second—or in some cases, first—thoughts about the fading away of Election Day.

Tuesday, September 30, 2008