11 October 2018 — 0726 mdt

Please — don’t vote this early

Absentee ballots will be mailed to many Montana voters tomorrow. Early voting started Tuesday.

My best advice to you: don’t vote this early. Set your absentee ballot aside and neither mark it nor mail it until the last week before the 6 November election.

Why? Something might happen that would change your mind about a candidate or ballot measure. If something does happen, and you’ve already voted, all you can do is rue your succumbing to the temptation of voting early and tuning out the campaign.

Will something bad happen? We don’t know. But even if a mind changing event is, or seems, highly improbable, betting that nothing will go wrong is a bad gamble for democracy. Our civic duty requires keeping our minds open — that means not voting — for as long as possible as the day of decision approaches.

Montana’s Democrats, and a lot of Montana’s Republicans, deprecate the notion that early voting is lazy. Democrats especially encourage early voting. They don’t fully trust their voters to vote or to vote for Democrats, so they want to lock in the votes of these voters as soon as possible. That also reduces the number of people who need to be called on election day to vote.

Democrats, and some Republicans, also believe that early voting and voting by mail increases turnout, citing studies of voting in Oregon and Colorado. Unfortunately, virtually all of those studies use the turnout of registered voters statistic, which is the wrong statistic for that analysis. The right statistic is the turnout of the voting eligible population — and my review of the literature, and my own investigations, does not lead me to conclude that voting by mail increases the VEP turnout in general elections.

A personal note. Although health and mobility issues at one point led me to consider voting by absentee ballot this year, I’ve decided to vote in person at my polling place on election day, as I have every election beginning in 1968. It’s a civic ceremony I enjoy, a ceremony that reminds me that my vote affects my friends and neighbors as well as me. If I’m sitting alone at my kitchen table, a stack of bills waiting to be paid after I mark my ballot, and bad news issuing from the radio, I might cast a less charitable vote.