The Last Election Day

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Let’s take Mayor Bill White at his word. All he really wanted to do was bring the blessings of good health to the citizens of Houston. And if he happened to use city resources to lure several thousand of his fellow Democrats to the polls to vote for his favorite candidates, well, that was just coincidence. A fluke.

“There was no political motivation whatsoever to do it,” Mr. White told reporters.

Still, you can imagine how some people — his Republican critics, for example — might have gotten the wrong idea.

With polling places throughout Houston open for “early voting” last week, Mr. White’s administration began offering free flu shots to older residents who came to their polling places to vote. In another weird fluke, all these polling places were in heavily Democratic neighborhoods.

Mr. White pulled the program after killjoy Republicans objected. But the little episode illuminates a quiet, mostly unnoticed revolution that has taken place in American democracy over the last 20 years.

Early voting and the wide availability of absentee ballots have changed how Americans vote. We are doing away with Election Day.

The political scientist John Fortier of the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., signals the trend in a new monograph, “Absentee and Early Voting: Trends, Promises, and Perils.”

In 1980, 95% of voters cast their presidential ballots on the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November — the federally mandated Election Day. Now, however, “there are many election days,” Mr. Fortier says, and they are often determined by the whim of the individual voters, who get to vote pretty much whenever they feel like it.

This year, Mr. Fortier projects, one in four voters will vote in a non-traditional way — using absentee ballots, voting at home by mail, or casting votes at a polling place in the weeks leading up to the official Election Day.

Already Oregon has practically eliminated polling places, as most Oregonians are now required to vote by mail. Next door, in Washington state, 70% of voters use absentee ballots. And the trend is accelerating nationwide as each state loosens access to the ballot.

The attraction of these new arrangements is obvious.

“Administrators like it because they can spread their resources out over several days or weeks, avoiding a one-time crunch on Election Day,” Mr. Fortier told me. “The political parties like it because they can lock in targeted voters by getting them ballots early and making sure they’re delivered.” And voters like it for the same reason pundits like to blog: It’s one more thing they can do in their pajamas, without having to leave the house or turn off the TV. And yet, much as this will shock reformers, who never seem to imagine that their schemes will entail a cost, there are problems with the new convenience in voting.

The reforms were enacted on the premise that making voting less onerous — as if taking an hour off from work to vote every two years were onerous — would increase turnout, especially among habitual non-voters.

“With a few small exceptions,” Mr. Fortier says, “that hasn’t happened.”

Research by the Center for the Study of the American Electorate at American University in Washington, D.C., has found, for example, that turnout in Oregon has not risen relative to other states. Other studies have even found that early voting has a negative effect on turnout. And where turnout has increased, it has done so among “occasional voters” rather than among non-voters.

Meanwhile, the reforms have opened up new avenues for abuse. Mayor White’s flu-shot come-on, concentrating a government benefit in polling places with voters sympathetic to the incumbents, suggests one form such abuses might take. Mr. Fortier points also to anecdotal reports of “ballot parties,” where vulnerable voters are encouraged to cast their votes in specified ways before mailing them.

None of this will deter our reformers from their impulse to constant improvement, of course. They won’t stop until Election Day is done away with altogether — and probably not even then.

The sad irony is that the recent wave of voting reforms is reversing another set of reforms, developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, that were themselves designed to eliminate abuses such as coerced, bribed, and fraudulent ballots.

The solution back then was to regularize voting through uniform, closely held ballots and rigorous monitoring of polling places. State after state passed laws to train poll watchers, safeguard access to ballots, and sanitize the polling place by keeping partisan campaigners at a safe distance.

In addition to clarifying the expression of the popular will, the earlier reforms had a wholesome side effect: They elevated voting — enshrined it, almost — as an act of great civic significance. Which, by the way, it is.

The reforms of the last 25 years send a less uplifting message. On the assumption that voting is somehow a niggling distraction from the more urgent tasks of daily life, today’s reformers relegate this essential obligation of citizenship to the status of filling out a grocery list without the added burden of actually having to go to the store.

I’m not a great admirer of reformers generally. But I know which of these two sets of dogooders has had the sounder idea of what it means to be a citizen. Mayor White will no doubt disagree.

Mr. Ferguson is a columnist for Bloomberg News.


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