And many of you complain about early voting. If someone knows he or she won’t be here for the election, why should they not take advantage of the early voting opportunity?
That is the purpose of absentee ballots.
Voting in a republic is a civic ritual with ceremonial aspects.
Part of the ceremony is that voters are supposed to have listened to the candidates and considered their arguments.
Now, we know this is partly or mostly fake - but it's still important, since it makes "elections" seem legitimate. Occasionally things happen late in a campaign which could (or should) change a voter's mind.
What early voting does is, it flips the script. It holds up the principle that it's fine to vote WITHOUT considering what the candidates have to say.
Now, you know and I know that there are tens of millions of voters in West Philadelphia and East St. Louis, and elsewhere, who know who they are going to vote for a year before the election. But this is bad. In a perfect world, no one should be voting who is not engaged in the process.
In African elections, the ballots are marked with a symbol. Each tribe, or nation if you must, has their own symbol, they all get ballots marked with that symbol, and they line up to cast them on "election day".
That's not the way our system is supposed to work.
If you know your vote before the campaign ends, if you do not pay attention to what is said and what is done and what is revealed during the campaigns, then our system has changed from what it used to be - and it's one short stop to declaring the result based on a racial or religious census without actual arithmetical counting of votes.
This is not, on the whole, a good thing.