BY DAN
KENNEDY
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Wednesday, August 18, 2004
EARLY TO VOTE. In the swing
states of Iowa and Arizona, voters will be able to cast their ballots
in the presidential campaign before George W. Bush and John Kerry
have held their first debate.
In Wisconsin, Washington, New
Mexico, and West Virginia they'll be able to vote before the third
and possibly decisive debate.
People in five other swing states -
North Carolina, Nevada, Arkansas, Colorado, and Florida - can vote as early as mid-October, with, of course, no possibility of changing their
minds depending on what happens in the final two weeks of the
campaign.
Is this good for democracy? I don't
think so. Yet it's a central reality of the 2004 campaign, as John
Harwood reports
(sub. req.) in today's Wall Street Journal. Harwood writes
that, according to some estimates, as many as one-third of voters
will cast their ballots before the November 2 election. He
adds:
The potential implications
of such growth in early ballots are enormous, if unpredictable. In
Iowa, for instance, voting kicks off a week before the first of
three scheduled Bush-Kerry debates. Pre-debate voting could lift
the incumbent in a contest that Democratic strategists like to
compare with the 1980 contest between President Jimmy Carter and
Ronald Reagan, which broke sharply toward Mr. Reagan after a
debate assured wavering voters of his competence.
At the same time, early votes
might precede the sort of late-breaking events that many Democrats
believe could help Mr. Bush - such as the capture of Osama bin
Laden, or a terror strike on U.S. soil.
The change has come about,
according to Harwood, because it appeals to "time-pressed voters."
But those same voters could be accommodated just as well through a
long-overdue reform: holding elections for two or three days over a
weekend. That would make voting much easier than it is now, while at
the same time keeping the idea of the election as a singular event
rather than something that is dragged out over several
months.
In a recent interview, Joe Lenski,
executive vice-president of Edison Media Research, told me that as
many as 20 million people - 20 percent of the total - could vote by
absentee ballot this year. He cited a reason that Harwood doesn't
mention: fears raised by 2000's Florida fiasco that your vote may not
count. Mailing in a paper ballot is just more reassuring than
touching a screen on a voting machine, Lenski explained. (Edison has
done exit
polling for the television
networks and the Associated Press. Its market-research clients
include the Phoenix Media/Communications Group.)
Sadly, that's a different issue not
solved by weekend voting. The breakdown of trust - documented just
this week alone by New York Times columnists Paul
Krugman and
Bob
Herbert - is real and
ongoing. In that sense, the rise of the absentee ballot is not a sign
of disengagement, but rather of a burning desire to stay engaged even
in the face of real doubts.
posted at 12:07 PM |
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1 Comments:
Go on a talking head diet. Watch only C-Span. No Matthews. No Russert. No Blitzer. Etc.
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MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
