Falling trust in elections isn’t a new problem. Until the mid-1800s, individual states set their own election timelines and were required only to schedule their votes within a 34-day window set by Congress. The loose rules created chaos, chief amongst them concerns around voter fraud, which eventually came to a head in the 1840s. As members of the House of Representatives argued in 1844, reform was needed “to guard against frauds in the elections of President and Vice President.” Sound familiar?
There were also concerns about early voting and how those returns could undermine turnout and even shift voters’ decisions in states with later elections. The advent of the electric telegraph also meant that earlier voters would be deprived of new information about events and candidates in an increasingly connected country.
To allay these concerns, Congress in 1845 passed what has come to be known as the Presidential Election Day Act to “establish a uniform time for holding elections for members of the House of Representatives, and for electors of President and Vice President, in all the States of the Union.”
The spirit of that law governed U.S. elections thereafter. “For nearly two centuries, Americans understood elections to be events conducted on a single, defined Election Day,” Trey Trainor, a former commissioner of the Federal Elections Commission, explained to me. “While absentee voting existed in limited circumstances, widespread post-Election Day ballot collection and counting was not the norm. That expectation gave voters confidence that everyone was participating under the same rules and within the same timeframe.”
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Apart from the trust issue, Americans shouldn’t be voting before election debates have even taken place and before election season is over. Small-d democratic deliberation (a contradiction in terms for pre-American republics) requires open, lengthy, and public debate that engages the full attention of the electorate. The ratification debates over the Constitution should be the standard. Early voting in September cuts short that process and encourages people to vote their prejudices rather than making considered judgements.