Early voting completely changes campaigns
Here’s a counterintuitive fact – about the same number of people in North Carolina voted on Election Day 1980 and Election Day 2008. How’s that possible? The key word is DAY. Millions more people voted in 2008, obviously, but more than half of the voters cast their ballots during the pre-Election Day early voting period. There was no one-stop early voting in 1980.
Early voting has fundamentally changed the dynamics of political campaigns in North Carolina. Candidates can no longer focus on turnout and action geared to one specific day, since more than half the people are voting over the course of several weeks.
Imagine these contrasting scenarios:
Candidate in 1980 – “Wow, that’s great that I have your support. Please make sure you go the polls on November 4th.”
Candidate in 2010 – “Wow, I’m so happy that I have your support. Can I give you a ride to an early voting site right now?”
Democrats in the state, in general, managed to seize the power of early voting in 2008. Democratic voters outnumbered Republicans by 800,000 in the early voting period – in a year that the Democratic presidential candidate carried the state by a mere 14,000 votes. Don’t expect that early voting advantage to remain in 2010.
The biggest drawback for early voting is that full-scale election season has started even earlier. Elected officials already have to spend a lot of time campaigning. This is a drain on resources and a deterrent to increasing the number of candidates for office.
But the benefit of early voting is huge. Early voting makes it easier for everyone to vote – only the fundamental basis of our entire Democracy. Citizens have shown their love for early voting. Out of 4.3 million voters in 2008, 2.6 million of them voted early. In North Carolina, you can now register and vote on the same day during the early voting period.
If you want to know a list of early voting sites in your county, click here: http://www.sboe.state.nc.us/content.aspx?id=17
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