Did you vote today? Many of your fellow citizens did. Twenty-five years ago, only a handful of business travelers, the bedridden, and overseas citizens voted absentee. In 2004, nearly one quarter of votes were cast before Election Day.

Research Fellow John C. Fortier

This week, I published “Absentee and Early Voting: Trends, Promises, and Perils” (American Enterprise Institute Press), in which I detail the rise of convenience voting, both absentee balloting and early polling-place voting.

The trend away from Election Day voting is extraordinary, but varies wildly from state to state. Oregon now votes 100 percent by mail, and many other Western states are not far behind. Meanwhile, in Texas and Tennessee, nearly half of all votes are cast before Election Day, but in polling places. New Mexico has a lot of both, with 20 percent voting absentee and another 30 percent at early polling places. Here on the East Coast, many states have not changed and cast less than 10 percent of their votes by absentee ballot.  Nationwide, we vote nearly 16 percent by absentee and 8 percent at early-voting polling places.

The advocates of expanded absentee voting argue that it is convenient, and by making voting easier, more citizens will turn out to vote. Polls show that voters do like the convenience of voting by mail, but exhaustive academic research has shown that, except in very low-turnout local elections, absentee or mail ballots do not increase voter turnout. The same people who now fill out absentee ballots at their kitchen tables are those who went to the polls before.

And while there is no evidence of widespread election fraud, with an absentee ballot, the secrecy of the ballot evaporates.  In a polling place, a voter who feels pressured to vote a certain way, can simply draw the voting booth curtain and vote privately. With an absentee ballot, who is to stop an overzealous spouse, boss, union, minister or colleague from trying to ensure that you cast the “correct vote”? Or who is to stop the petty corruption of paying $50 to see a properly filled out absentee ballot? In addition, there have been instances of corrupt individuals who intercept ballots or fill them out for the sick and elderly.

Early voting at polling places is also popular with voters, and states that have offered it on a wide scale have a very high and increasing percentage of early voters. And while studies have shown that early polling-place voting also does not increase voter turnout, it does offer the convenience of absentee voting with the privacy and fraud protections of the voting booth.

Our quiet revolution in voting has effects on the campaigns in the field today. Assumptions about when to peak and when to go negative are changing. And both parties push their core voters to vote early as part of their get-out-the-vote efforts.

Purists who believe in a single election day worry that pre-election-day voters might miss out on important campaign information if they vote too early, and they rightly celebrate Election Day as an important civic event.

These concerns are well founded, but the genie is out of the bottle; we will see even higher levels of pre-election-day voting in the future. What to do? As a general matter, early voting with the protections of the polling place is preferable to absentee voting. If we limit absentee voting to those who truly need it, but allow a short and intense one-week period to vote at polling places, we might preserve secrecy of the ballot and the civic importance of the old system, while providing voters the convenience they desire.

John C. Fortier is a research fellow at AEI.