Arguments for and against early voting

When you look at the intersectional barriers that people face, whether they’re working class, students, working parents, single parents, and then obviously having the inflexible schedule that you usually have when you’re working low-wage jobs, it can disproportionately impact women. ... It makes all the sense that those people couldn’t turn out on a traditional 12-hour Election Day.^[6]

• Being able to vote early, including on the two weekends leading up to Election Day, gives voters more opportunities to cast their votes at the polls. Instead of voting all on one single high-stakes weekday, voters will be able to pick a time that works for them, from a range of dates and hours.
  

• Early voting provides flexibility to voters who can’t take time off to vote during the week. Election Day is usually on a weekday, and it’s not a holiday that most workers get time off for. While in New York State, your employer is required by law to provide you with three hours of paid time off to vote on Election Day (as long as you provide two days’ notice), early voting provides voters with even more options. It also helps to address historic and deep-rooted inequalities in the labor force that often prevent minorities or low-income New Yorkers from participating in the electoral process.
  

• Having more days for voting means faster and more efficient Election Day lines. Early voting means Election Day lines are shorter, and poll workers and election administrations can devote more time to making sure voting processes are working smoothly each day. And when the system works more efficiently, voter confidence in the system grows, which is key for encouraging active participation in our elections.^[6]

The more prudent route to greater voting access is to create and maintain early voting centers, open for a week in every county, in every state. Such centers could accommodate the needs of shift workers or those who might need to cast their ballots at night or on a different day. ... Establishing early voting centers is something municipalities could actually accomplish by this November. They also provide help for the disabled to vote in private, while preserving the secret ballot for all. States that currently vote by mail already vote up to a month early. So the establishment of early voting centers would not be a prohibitively disruptive system. In conclusion, all 50 states would benefit from early-voting centers: shorter lines, ballots tabulated daily, and final tallies by the end of the week.^[6]

[V]oting earlier lowers the 'price' of participating in an election in terms of time and inconvenience. But that also means it cheapens the vote, which means people value it less. ... When voting becomes easier...more people vote who are less engaged in politics.

Early voting also makes strategic voting more difficult. Say you voted for Elizabeth Warren a month ago, on the first day of early voting. It’s not that you loved her; it’s just that you thought she’d be a better general election candidate. Well, she’s now looking like such a long shot that a vote for Warren is likely to be a vote wasted — and there’s nothing you can do about it.^[6]

Early voting also requires marked ballots to languish for days or weeks. What could go wrong?

Fraud is a genuine risk. Making early ballots disappear from overwhelmingly Democratic or Republican precincts could throw elections. Even if nothing inappropriate happens, as ballots gather dust, they generate suspicions of monkey business, especially in skin-tight races. Such doubts corrode confidence in institutions and officials.

Even among angels, storing ballots for weeks risks their innocent misplacement, damage, or destruction in fires, floods, hurricanes, or tornadoes.^[6]

Early voting also poses another danger: '[t]he most significant is the danger that something may occur on the last few days of the electoral season' after tens of millions of citizens have cast an irrevocable vote. Early voters are voting with a different set of facts than those who vote on Election Day...

A recent example of this danger was demonstrated in a special election for Montana’s lone congressional race in 2017. Just one day before the May 25 election, one of the two candidates, Republican Greg Gianforte, was charged with misdemeanor assault against a reporter for the Guardian newspaper. Two of the state’s largest newspapers, the Billings Gazette and the Missoulian, withdrew their endorsements that same Wednesday evening before the Thursday election. But by that time, 70 percent of Montanans had already cast their vote and had no opportunity—if they thought this incident was important to their choice—to change their votes.^[6]