The election is still three weeks away, and hundreds of thousands of Americans have already voted. Yet in politics a lot can happen in only a few days: Donald Trump has recently been accused of groping women, and leaked emails show Hillary Clinton’s staff mocking Catholics. How many Americans who voted before those revelations wish they could get their ballots back?
Traditional absentee voting—commonly allowed for sickness, physical disability, religious observance or prolonged absence overseas—imposes minimal burdens while not undercutting the civic benefits of a single election day. But no-excuse early voting presumes that Americans have fixed views and that the candidates cannot say or do anything to influence them in the final weeks of the campaign. In that sense it is a corruption of the democratic process—one that accepts and encourages the partisan divisions that plague modern American politics and poison the civic spirit.
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