As you probably are aware, rolling back early voting dates was a key provision of North Carolina’s voting law, which the Supreme Court effectively blocked with its deadlocked vote last week.
With that in mind, National Review’s Jim Geraghty makes a case against early voting:
One of the central concepts of an election is everyone casting ballots at roughly the same time, with each voter making his decision with roughly the same information. New information can change voters’ behavior, even on Election Day. Democrats fumed when Jimmy Carter conceded the 1980 presidential election before polls had closed on the West Coast; they suspected some Democrats didn’t bother voting with the presidential election already decided, hurting the chances of down-ticket Democrats.
The public doesn’t know how early voters decided until the ballots are counted election night, but early-voting records do tell us whether registered Democrats or registered Republicans are turning out to vote. In some future year, the early-voting figures will give analysts an excellent sense of which party is getting out their vote, and is thus more likely to win. Election Day could become a mere formality, and early voting may become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
That said, Geraghty does not think early voting is all bad, considering “(r)esponsible, motivated voters can find themselves unexpectedly hindered on the traditional date.” On the flip side, “(w)e can only guess what will happen in the final weeks before Election Day 2016″……no telling what WikiLeaks has up its sleeve.
