Donald Trump racked up an enormous lead in the early vote for Louisiana’s Republican presidential primary. The tally just before election day was 47 percent for Trump, 23 percent for Ted Cruz and 20 percent for Marco Rubio.
But the final tally looked almost completely different. That’s because early voting in Louisiana took place Feb. 20-27, mostly before Trump’s awful debate performance on February 25. And all of the early votes were before Feb. 28, when Trump pretended on national television that he’d never heard of the state’s least popular resident, David Duke, or the Ku Klux Klan.
On election day itself, March 5, Cruz got 41 percent of the vote in Louisiana, beating Trump by half a point. But thanks to early voting, many voters could not take Trump’s erratic behavior into account. So he won the primary and collected the delegates even though he was beaten by his main rival on election day.
By voting early, those voters made themselves into low-information voters.
Similarly, early voting in Georgia went on for three weeks in February, ending on the 26th. That means nearly all of the 260,000 early votes in the Republican primary, a third of the total, had been cast before any of the events mentioned above had occurred. Atlanta radio host Michael Graham told us that after Trump’s Klan interview, two days before election day, he was deluged by emails from local listeners asking how they could get their vote back. Sorry, folks, no can do.
Early voting in the Florida primary is creating another strange scenario that bodes ill for democracy. More than half a million ballots have already been cast for a March 15 election that might see only 2.5 million votes overall. Many (and according to one poll, most) of those ballots are for Marco Rubio. Rubio’s campaign has recently been collapsing in other states. But were he to drop out of the race, a quarter million votes in the Sunshine State would simply be wasted, and everyone who cast them would be disenfranchised, unable to vote for an actual candidate for the presidency.
In general elections, preferences tend to be much more static, and candidates almost never just drop out. So it is more persuasive, although not compelling, to argue that voting in the weeks before “election day” should be acceptable.
But primaries, especially presidential primaries, are not like general elections. Not only do candidates frequently drop out on election eve (as Ben Carson did Friday) but preferences can shift rapidly.
The consequence is worse than that voters can’t have their votes back. It is that, as in Lousiana, they give victory and momentum to a candidate whom they would have voted against. Even if their candidate quits the race or promises to nuke Canada, he still gets their vote if they have voted for him early.
It’s bad policy to encourage people to vote early in presidential primary elections, and perhaps in all primaries. Both parties should end it. States shouldn’t encourage it, either, by holding long early voting periods before nominating contests.
If Republicans want to avoid having Trump make a mockery of their nominating process, they should (where it’s legal) close their primaries to non-Republicans and work to limit or eliminate early voting in presidential primaries.
