National Review Doesn’t Like Poor People
By Daniel Strauss - Nov 4th, 2008 at 6:12 pmI’ve been having trouble figuring out a reason not to have an early voting option. What’s there to lose? Fewer people would flood the polls on election day, and people who wouldn’t otherwise be able to vote because of work would have an alternative. There’s also the fact that offering just one day to vote allows for a much greater opportunity for voter fraud.
But the obviously wrongheaded, agenda-driven editors at National Review disagree. In one of the most disgusting editorials I’ve read in a while–no… wait… ever–they argue against early and absentee voting because it apparently: allows for massive voter registration fraud (yeah, people coming to the polls with names like Mickey Mouse really are the bane of our democratic system), cuts down on the amount of time voters have to learn about the candidates (because a presidential campaign spanning two years really didn’t offer enough opportunity to discuss the issues), and is undemocratic in that it doesn’t allow everyone to vote at once.
I disagree with this last point in particular. The entire point of having an election on a Tuesday was originally for the convenience of the people. It’s now inconvenient for Election Day to be just one day, and so we have a somewhat efficient, piecemeal solution–it could be better, though. What the highly partisan NR editors are really objecting to is voters who don’t step in line behind their blindly conservative stances. Some of these people just can’t afford to vote on one day, for a number of reasons, and what the editors are afraid of is that when these people do vote it won’t be the way the editors want them to. So they claim early voting is basically undemocratic–but the truly undemocratic ones are the people against early voting.
(h/t: Ankush Khardori at Cogitamus )
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