I skipped out the door of the polling place this afternoon 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 won’t 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, maybe online or by mail, or weeks ago in the office of some county registrar.
Nearly 40 percent of votes will have been cast before Election Day this year, according to estimates by specialists like John Fortier, director of the Democracy Project at the Bipartisan Policy Center. These are 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 five percent of votes cast. When I hoped to cast my first vote in a presidential election, for instance, my hometown election board required me to sign a notarized affidavit testifying that I attended college out of state before they’d send me an absentee ballot.
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 mossbacks 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 voting” 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. Once the vote was devalued in this way, it was a small step to in-person early voting. Now most states—34, at last count—let you vote any time within weeks before Election Day. In the rush to convenience, the once-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 civil 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 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, finds 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. Fortier says: “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, and generally that hasn’t been the case.”
But this all avoids the central question. Why, we might ask but never do, is voting supposed to be convenient? Technically, of course, voting is not a constitutional “right.” But it is an obligation. A little inconvenience can be a good thing—a reminder that what you’re doing is a bit out of the ordinary, slightly elevated above everyday life, like wearing a tuxedo or a wedding dress. (I avoid both.) In fact, you could make the case that a lot of inconvenience, when it comes to voting, would be a good thing. I long for the day when the trends reverse and states move back to the traditional Election Day—a day when there will only be only one polling place in every state, situated on the highest point above sea level or some other similarly inaccessible location. Far from being anti-democratic, such an arrangement would be a triumph for democracy, for it would ensure that everyone who voted was truly committed to self-government.
I guess I’m just a starry-eyed idealist.
