Early Voting Cancels Some Last Ditch Efforts

With the mid-term elections 8 days away, the candidates are turning up the heat on one another. The nasty ads are about to air, the final pleas for money are being made and the national campaign coordinators are trying to decide who needs some extra help in the last week. None of this takes into account the rise of early voting. A great many ballots have already been cast, and any shift in public sentiment now can’t change those votes. Thus, these last ditch efforts are already too late.

Early voting has always been possible, of course. It’s called an absentee ballot. Compared to registering and just turning up to vote at a nearby school or what ever, an absentee ballot is a pain. Written requests, early deadlines and rules that are deliberately crafted to discourage voters (requiring notarized ballots for example) have customarily been a deterrent. Besides, walking into the voting booth is as close as American civil society gets to a sacrament.

The 2000 and 2004 elections changed that. Electronic voting without paper trails (would one do business at an ATM that didn’t give receipts?), hanging chads and long lines outside some precincts have created a demand for early voting. In New Jersey, for example, 2 million people will vote electronically next Tuesday without benefit of a paper trail – unless they vote absentee. State law demands a paper record but not until 2008. Will any of the New Jersey votes be counted? How can one be sure?

Meanwhile out west, things seem to have moved well beyond this. Oregon does its voting by mail and has for about a decade. According to the AP, “More than half of all votes are absentee in Washington, Nevada, New Mexico and Texas. Marin County, just north of San Francisco, has sent ballots to 54 percent of its nearly 147,000 registered voters. And registrar Elaine Ginnold expects to mail thousands more before the Oct. 31 deadline for requesting absentee ballots. In the June primary, 57 percent of Marin voters were absentee.”

So, the candidates can sling all the mud they want. The party machines can go into their 72-hour Get Out The Vote efforts. The TV and radio networks (none of which are entirely objective – that’s an impossibility) can pretend their coverage counts. Messrs. Gallup and Zogby can announce whatever tracking polls they want. Not much of it will matter. For a great many voters the 2006 elections are already over.

© Copyright 2006 by The Kensington Review, Jeff Myhre, PhD, Editor. No part of this publication may be reproduced without written consent. Produced using Fedora Linux.

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