This article in today’s Washington Examiner explains why early voting for primaries may not be such a good idea. As we have seen this year a lot can happen in the couple weeks or even a few days between when one early votes and election day. The person you vote for could drop out of the race or new information could come to light that would have otherwise persuaded you to change your vote if you had waited. The Examiner argues that outcomes in both the Louisiana and Georgia primaries may have been different if early voters had waited. The article notes that:
…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.
And then goes on to point out that:
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.
The article concludes by noting that:
…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.
I’ll be waiting till election day. I want all the information I can get.