In North Carolina, we have “no excuse” early voting. Essentially it means that we have a time period (I think it’s a couple weeks) prior to election day, and at any time during that time period, we can go in and vote, no questions asked. This year, somewhere around 1 million people have used the system.
Frankly, I think it’s cool. Why in the world would we want to strap ourselves to the single-day method? It’s not like there’s anything special about the first Tuesday in November, and if someone decides that there is, how about ending the two-week period on that day? If nothing else, it should save schools from having to schedule teacher workdays to handle everyone’s voting on a single day. It should also greatly reduce stress on any counting of the votes. They could even be reviewed in that time.
Of course, one worry would be the condition of the voter. Namely, if you have a couple weeks to vote, what happens if you cast a vote a week before they votes are tallied, and then die? Hey, it could happen. It has happened. I’m sure it happens more frequently than we might suspect. But the same thing could happen in a single-day voting period. There are going to be people who vote on the way to work in the morning and get in a wreck on their way home in the afternoon.
I can’t imagine that this number is statistically significant.