Early Voting is For Suckers
A staunch traditionalist, I waited until Election Day to cast my ballot over at the First Christian Church on Mississippi in Little Rock. Leaving Arkansas Project World Headquarters at 7:47 a.m., I did my civic duty and pulled back into the driveway at 8:26 a.m.—a 39-minute round trip. (The line was out the door when I arrived, but was entirely inside when I left, so I likely would have shaved off another 10 or even 15 minutes had I not arrived at the tail end of the first flush of voters.)
Now, Arkansas Project contributor Dan Greenberg reported early vote wait times of more than an hour at Thompson Library on October 22. On Friday afternoon, Arkansas Project Girlfriend (APG) voted early at the McMath Library, a process that took her nearly two hours (that’s her photo of the line on Friday afternoon at left).
Lesson: If you value your time, early voting is for suckers. But I would like to thank you, Arkansas Early Voters, for spending the additional time waiting in line these last few weeks so that I could have smooth and convenient sailing on Election Day. I owe you one.
Update: Arkansas Project contributor Freeman Hunt up in the northwest corner of the state, at her other blogging home, joins me in rejecting the tyranny of early voting.
I couldn’t agree more. It’s more fun to vote on Election Day at your neighborhood precinct, and the lines are almost always shorter.
It looks like everybody and his brother wrote against early voting yesterday. I blogged about it here http://jaypgreene.com/2008/11/04/why-i-vote-on-election-day/. National Review wrote about it here http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NDFmZmFiM2ExOWI4NjFmOWUxN2E4MWQ2ZWRiNjRlZmI= . And both The Arkansas Project and Freeman Hunt. And Fred Barnes spent much of the early evening on Fox denouncing it.
I also think it’s funny that TV news loves to feature stories about long lines at polling places immediately followed by a call for everyone to get out and vote. It’s like saying: “This food tastes awful. Would you like to have some?”