Why vote early?

[dreamshark]

Minnesota instituted early voting this year, and it's been a huge hit. Obviously it is handy if you will be out of town on election day, or working, or otherwise unable to vote at your local polling place. But other than that, why are people doing it? I biked over to my polling place for my jolly Election Day ritual, and was saddened at how empty it was. Not that I wanted to stand in a long line, but I'm talking about a large gym with a dozen or more eager poll workers and maybe 6 voters. As I approached the long table with the voting registers you could see them all begging with their eyes, "Please, be A-E!"  "Please, be F-K!" They told me that the line for early voting yesterday was out the door and down the block. WTF?  There were also a ton of entries in the election book stamped "AB" for "Absentee Ballot," which I gather is a different procedure entirely.

Mail-in ballots unquestionably reduce the chances of your ballot being counted, but I can't think of any objective downside to early "in-person" voting except that it makes Election Day less fun for me. But I really don't see the UP side for most people. If you voted early (as so many people I know did) can you tell me why? How long did you have to wait in line? I'm just idly curious. And I missed y'all on Election Day

Comments

[quadong.livejournal.com]

I voted early in IL a while back because I realized I was going to be in MN today. There was no line. It was also not the day before election day, though.

"Mail-in ballots unquestionably reduce the chances of your ballot being counted"

Citation needed? Why do you say this? Just because you don't get to see the ballot actually drop into the box this way, or do you think something more sinister is happening?

[mle292.livejournal.com]

I trust the USPS a lot. I really liked being able to look up everything online with the ballot right in front of me. No carrying a bit of paper that I might lose anyway.

[vgqn.livejournal.com]

I do a mail-in ballot here in California because I vastly prefer sitting at my desk or table, carefully transferring my decisions from my sample ballot. Especially with the crazy long list of ballot propositions we sometimes have.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

As I said in conversation last night, I got that data from the very thorough and professional Senate vote recount in Minnesota in 2008, which I followed obsessively. After an excruciating months-long process it was determined that in-person voting in Minnesota was incredibly accurate. There were a handful of anomalous in-person votes (less than 200 out of 3.5 million!), mostly voter error like people voting at the wrong polling place and a handful of felons who wrongly voted.

But there were an embarrassing number of missteps with absentee ballots: enough so that the Secretary of State's office expressed concerns about the procedures and promised to work on overhauling it. I'm not sure if they ever did, but it made me stop and think about how many steps need to go right for a mail-in ballot to be counted correctly. The reliability of the USPS is just one small factor. There are many more steps in handling mail-in ballots, and at every step there is a small chance of human error or systemic failure.

Most of the problems were with absentee ballots. In fact, it was a question about the handling of of 654 absentee ballots that started the recount in the first place. Other problems that turned up along the way were 32 absentee ballots that got left in somebody's car and didn't get counted. 150 absentee ballots were allegedly double-counted when someone mistakenly fed them into the wrong machine. Yes, these are small numbers, but this was at a time where the only way you could vote by mail was if you provided proof that you HAD to have an absentee ballot. So this type of ballot was a small percentage of the total votes, but still amounted to the lion's share of voting inaccuracies.

[dreamshark.livejournal.com]

see my comment to Matt. The USPS (which I agree is quite reliable) is just one small step in a surprisingly Byzantine process. Actually the point where the most absentee ballots got rejected in 2008 was the address check. There were also random human errors in ballot handling, such as absentee ballots fed into the wrong machine or overlooked for one reason or another and not fed into ANY machine. And of course the voter doesn't have the benefit of the immediate "spoiled ballot check" from the voting machines.

All that being said, I agree that the chances of an absentee ballot being lost were still found to be quite small. But an order of magnitude higher than ballots cast at a polling place.

[carbonel]

I voted early but in-person, because I was in Florida on Election Day.

Most years, I vote on the day. I usually have to wait no more than 10 minutes for a presidential election, not at all for others.