The Day America Stops Voting

I skipped out the door of the polling place last Tuesday as I usually do after voting, filled with patriotism and awe and reverence and gratitude for such a privilege—and a tinge of regret that so many of my fellow voters weren't going to share the experience, because they were too stupid or too lazy or too damn "busy" to make time on Election Day to cast their ballots. They had already done so, probably by mail, or maybe weeks ago shuffling through the office of some county registrar.

Roughly 40 percent of votes were expected to be cast before Election Day this year, according to John Fortier, director of the Democracy Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center. These were not the traditional absentee ballots that were once granted only to people who could prove they would be out of town on business or who suffered some debility that kept them from making it to the polls on the big day. Before 1980, Fortier says, absentee ballots accounted for about 5 percent of votes cast. In my own case, for instance, when I hoped to cast my first vote in a presidential election, before my hometown election board would send me an absentee ballot they required me to sign a notarized affidavit testifying that I attended college out of state.

The new arrangement is called "convenience voting," properly enough, since convenience is now the highest value in most areas of life, from food to banking. Convenience voting has turned Election Day into a kind of last resort, an option for hoary traditionalists or laggards who didn't get around to casting their votes already. Election Day is no longer the day America votes. It's just the day America stops voting.

Like so many terrible ideas, convenience voting originated in California, which introduced "no excuse absentee balloting" back in the seventies. From that point on, voters no longer needed a good reason to avoid their civic duty; they could blow off Election Day just because they felt like it and—literally—mail it in. Once the vote was devalued in this way, it was a small step to in-person early voting. Now 34 states and the District of Columbia let you vote at least a week before Election Day, some up to three weeks. In the rush to convenience, a widely shared assumption was lost: the belief that voting was so important that a voter, when Election Day arrived, really couldn't have a higher priority, at least for the half hour or so it took to vote. If America had a civic religion, Election Day was the day we went to church. We're all agnostics now.

Reforms never work the way they're supposed to, of course. There's some evidence that convenience voting isn't so convenient after all. Consider that hardy perennial of Election Day press coverage, the long lines that are straining the patience of voters. Fortier says the best evidence, collected by the Presidential Commission on Election Administration, shows that the longest lines are found not in polling places on Election Day but at voting centers for early in-person voting. And the big boost to voter turnout that convenience voting was supposed to generate hasn't happened. "There were those who hoped that making it much easier to vote in all these ways would just lead more and more people to vote," Fortier says. "And generally that hasn't been the case."