Early Voting

Driving over to the airport this morning, I heard radio reports calling for 90% turnout in Connecticut, and a long line was already visible at my neighborhood polling place 15 minutes before it opened.

In CT, we are only allowed to vote absentee if we are disabled or will be out of town during voting hours on election day.

Perhaps it’s time to reconsider such restrictions.

Seen in the Sacramento Bee:

Super Tuesday seems long gone as the nation turns its hungry eyes to the next round of presidential primaries – but for nearly a million Californians, the votes they cast in the presidential primary are yet to be counted.[...]

Statewide, Weir said, most of the uncounted votes – about 600,000 – are absentee ballots turned in on election day. Still to be vetted, he reckons, are 400,000 provisional ballots, which typically are valid about 85 percent of the time.

He estimates 10,000 more uncounted ballots are damaged: shredded in the mail, mutilated in vote-counting machines, or gummed up by sloppy voters who dribbled coffee or ketchup on their absentee ballots. Election workers must pry them open, try to figure out the voter’s intention, and then create a fresh ballot to feed into the machine.

Note to self: California is not Florida.

The reason that the trivia of California’s vote-count still not being complete isn’t really trivial is a reflection of the closeness of the Democratic nomination race. This cycle, for Obama and Hillary, every single delegate matters, and it seems that a few California delegates may hang in the balance of all these yet-to-be-counted votes.

A couple more thoughts while they’re percolating in my brain:

On putting a fork in the Romney and Huckabee campaigns

According to the tally at CNN, Romney has 268 delegates to date, while Huckabee has 169.  The number of delegates required to win at convention is 1,191.  I believe there are still 1,035 delegates up for grabs.  Do a little math, and you see that unless either Romney or Huckabee  start sweeping the remaining states, they’re on the verge of being eliminated unless other deal(s) are made.

CNN shows McCain at 615 delegates.  He needs 56% of the remaining delegates…and it’s worth noting that several of the remaining states are not winner-take-all.

On the Impact of Early Voting

I noticed something interesting in the California results (with 92% of precincts reporting):

• Dems — Clinton 52%, Obama 42%, Edwards 4%
• GOP — McCain 42%, Romney 34%, Huckabee 12%, Giuliani 5%, Paul 4%, Thompson 2%

California is one of the states that has early voting, and there were expectations that the fact that folks could cast ballots before some of the recent drop-outs dropped out, and before some of the recent changes in perceived momentum occurred could mess with the accuracy of pre-primary polls.

When I went to bed last night, Edwards and Giuliani were showing double-digit results in the early returns, and Thompson had a total in the high single-digits, admittedly with admittedly a relatively small portion of the vote in.

While I haven’t heard that the apparent early strength of dropped-out candidates may have been a manifestation of the early votes… I do wonder about that.

So, a thought — perhaps a supporter of “preference voting” or “instant run-off voting” ought to investigate that phenomenon, and use it as a basis to argue that the fast pace and tumultuousness of the primary campaign this cycle provides strong evidence that early voting needs to be linked to preference or instant-runoff voting.

On the Compressed, Early Timeline of the Primary Campaign

The experience of the past six weeks has me more convinced than ever that the Presidential primary game needs to be reformed.

While I don’t mind a couple of non-representitive small states serving the role of weeding out nonviable candidates, I do worry that the whirlwind campaign means that money could be playing too big a role (e.g. what if Edwards or Dodd had had more money to get their messages out; or what if Obama and McCain hadn’t had their recent fundraising successes?), and that Joe Average voter isn’t getting a great opportunity to make informed choices.

I stand even more strongly behind my idea of a rotating system of regional primaries, to allow more time for voters to learn about the candidates, to permit candidates to have a bit of geographic focus when campaigning (hopefully reducing expense and wasteful travel), and in order to make everyone’s primary vote potentially relevant (by having about half the delegates decided in the final wave).