The Case Against One-Day Voting

With an estimated one out of three Americans casting ballots before Election Day this year, it may be time to rethink the tradition of having millions of voters swamp polling places on a Tuesday in November. Why just one day? Why not two, three or even a week?

The advantages of converting to an Election Week are many and obvious:

*With the uncertainties of electronic gadgetry, a longer period would reduce not only endless lines and voter frustration but allow more time to resolve registration challenges and to count and, if necessary, recount ballots;

*Races would not be decided by bad weather conditions that sometimes make it difficult for the aged and the infirm to get to polls;

*The self-employed and others who find it hard to take working time off would have the choice of voting on a Saturday;

*The process would not be so dependent on aggressive get-out-the-vote tactics by political parties.

When a Tuesday was chosen in 1845, people traveled by horse and buggy, and farmers often needed a day to get to the county seat and a day to get back, without interfering with the Sabbath. Now, in Nevada, we have voting machines in shopping malls.

This year, with record numbers of early votes and absentee ballots, there is a de facto move to a longer voting period. Even so, the new Congress may want to look back at next Tuesday's problems in what promises to be a record turnout and rethink the wisdom of squeezing the decision about our national future into a single day.

Some might insist that inconvenience should be a part of civic duty to weed out the unmotivated and uniformed. But that would be, to borrow a word from this year's campaign, an "elitist" argument.

Exit-Polling the Early Turnout

The tea leaves are showing a pattern that becomes clearer every day in forecasting an Obama-Biden victory:

At least 2.2 million voters have already cast ballots, according to one estimate, pointing to a record early turnout. Of 500,000 in North Carolina, 56 percent were Democrats, 28 percent Republicans, 16 percent unaffiliated.

Among the polling places being swamped by turnout is Fairfax County in northern Virginia, an area pooh-poohed as not "the real Virginia" by McCain advisor Nancy Pfotenhauer, where early voters filled a meeting room and threatened to spill over into the parking lot.

Supporting evidence for the trend comes from the Gallup daily tracking poll, which shows Obama with a growing edge as the economy worsens, and from numbers crunchers at the National Journal, which headlines "In Endgame, Metrics Are Adding Up For Obama" and summarizes:

"As things are going now, this election would appear to be on a track to match Bill Clinton's 1992 5.6 percent margin over President George H.W. Bush, the question is whether it gets to Bush's 1988 7.7 percent win over Michael Dukakis or Clinton's 8.5 percent win over Robert Dole in 1996.

"Maybe some cataclysmic event occurs in the next two weeks that changes the trajectory of this election, but to override these factors, it would have to be very, very big."

Cataclysms and the Bradley Effect aside, with 13 days to go, the picture is coming into focus.