When Iowa Republican legislators shortened the voting window from 40 days to 20, one of the arguments they made was "people shouldn't vote before the debates."
The one and only Harris-Trump debate was September 10. I emailed the first ballots to overseas voters on September 14. Why not let the rest of us start voting? I
t's clear the shorter window did NOT accomplish the goal of shifting people's voting plans away from the "exceptional" early voting and toward the "normal" Election Day voting. Even the Republicans get that - they stepped up their vote by mail program this year.
Today at the Coralville Library we had 871 voters- our biggest site ever that did not involve how old you had to be to get into a bar, and our 3rd biggest overall.
(Long ago I discussed the statistical anomalies of our 2010 general election: https://jdeeth.blogspot.com/.../number-crunching-part-2... )
All the shorter voting period has accomplished is cramming the same* amount of work into half the time. All that does is make the line twice as long.
* MORE than twice the work, really. The ban on pre-filled forms, even for in person early voting, has increased the error rate. We spend an insane amount of time chasing down the nit-pickiest problems. Actual phone call we have to make: "When you voted in the lobby yesterday, what day did you sign the form?"
It's going to take majorities to fix this.
