Learning to love early voting

For many years I argued against encouraging widespread early voting and universal absentee voting instead of building up Election Day. This year, I'm spending hours on hours making phone calls to help citizens make a plan to vote either by mail or at early voting drop off locations.

Now, obviously, we're in the midst of an infectious pandemic. Lots of us shouldn't even think about taking the risk to join crowds at polling places. The alternative ways to cast a ballot are sensible, legitimate, and for some people, perhaps life saving.

So why did I used to be so hostile to methods of voting that didn't involve marking a ballot at a polling place on Election Day?

For many years, my work in elections was aimed at increasing participation by people who the electoral system had pushed to the margins -- young people, queer people, poor people, people of color -- all usually infrequent voters or just non-voters. And I thought anything that reduced excitement about Election Day was a step in the wrong direction when it came to boosting these individuals' willingness to acquire a new habit of engaged citizenship.

Here's a smidgen of the argument I made in 2007:

Insofar as voting is a private thing you do by yourself in your home, folks who aren't accustomed to it are less likely to get around to it. Isolation can breed alienation from participation. Community reinforcement helps turn out infrequent voters.

Doing the community's business of citizenship is not something to live out alone. Community organizations need to experiment with ways to make voting a more collective experience. Of course every person's ballot is secret, but voting need not be so lonely as convenience systems tend to make it. Some experiments have included group classes in using new voting systems (such as when touch screens have replaced punch card ballots) and picnics followed by group walks to early voting sites. Finding ways to increase the sense of community, as well as of convenience, is a winning strategy, and a necessity, for progressive electoral organizers.

I had read a good deal of the history of U.S. elections. The highest percentage turnout of eligible voters was achieved in the last decade of the 19th century when political parties turned out their supporters in raucous parades, often accompanied by much drinking and skirmishes between opponents. Election Day was a kind of grand civic party, enjoyed by many, if not by all (all women and most men of color were still excluded). We don't want elections that look like that -- but participation would probably benefit from more shared excitement.

So here we are in this strange moment and all modes of early and mail-in and dropbox voting are going strong -- in early October.  According to Professor Michael McDonald of the University of Florida who tracks this voting, as of October 12:

Voters have cast a total of 9,418,366 ballots in the reporting states.

In Florida, where the UniteHERE phone bank has been making calls, 2.5 million Democrats have requested mail-in ballots and one third of their votes have already come in. In contrast, 1.8 million Republicans have asked for mail-in ballots and 27 percent have voted so far. McDonald sensibly cautions that though these numbers look great for the Biden-Harris ticket, we should not get too excited as most of these votes are likely from older, habitual voters. He predicts that in a week or so Democrats will be wailing that younger voters got their mail-in ballots but didn't send them in promptly. That's where campaigns come in, calling and texting these voters until they do the deed.

The New York Times writes that early voting is already exceeding all past expectations in the Rust Belt.

The Wisconsin ballot numbers illustrate how much voting has changed in the pandemic era. In the 2016 general election, 146,294 Wisconsinites voted by mail, and 666,035 others voted at in-person early-voting sites. In the current general election, 646,987 people have already voted absentee as of Friday. Early-voting sites start opening in Wisconsin on Oct. 20.

That's regular people demonstrating that they are taking the virus seriously, even as Trump and his GOPer minions refuse to.

In this year, when a significant fraction of the resistance electorate would walk across hot coals barefoot to evict Trump, mail-in voting, early voting, and "convenience" voting are not going to depress enthusiasm. For people who are working on these campaigns, and our numbers are unprecedented, we're living a month long Election Day. We don't need no stinking parades to raise our sense of collective action. (A lot of us did that in June and July anyway.) After 7 months of pandemic lockdown and economic devastation all around, both excitement and anxiety are off the charts. Though Professor McDonald and all responsible observers caution against reading too much into the vote so far, an overall turnout record seems likely.

But, if this floundering country ever returns to less angst-filled elections, will all this individualistic solitary voting depress participation in the future? I still think it might. Voting alone feels antithetical to engaged citizenship. 

Perhaps we're in for a several decade season of fraught elections as the country struggles toward becoming a historically unprecedented, rich but more just, multi-racial democracy. That might keep turnout high.

Or, if things go wrong, voter suppression by a thousand impediments, from legal hurdles through thugs with AR-15s, just might rob us of hope. Got to go make some more phone calls.