Why early voting is problematic.

Jonah Goldberg raises the issue here but he fails to be clear about one of the biggest problems with early/extended voting: it's not only that it makes it easier for low information voters to vote with low information, it encourages polarizing demagoguery and snap voting.

Imagine I'm a candidate and you're an unlikely voter in my target demographic in a state that has early voting: I need to motivate you to vote: I can't pay you or give you another concrete incentive. I can tell you all the swell things I'm going to do but most of them have been promised so often by both parties that no one is going get up off their duff and find the ballot or even worse drive to a polling place for a lousy politician's promise.

But what about fear and anger? What if we get you upset about my opponent. Doesn't have to be true it just has to be plausible to you - the detached, low information voter. Both parties have a laundry list of hot buttons that they can press and I don't know which one will ring your bell so I'm going to run these smears one after another in the hope that one will get you so agitated that you'll drop whatever you're doing and vote right then, right there on the basis of that single (dubious, slanted) factoid. I don't need your long term support I just need ten minutes of righteous anger.

Contrast that with traditional voting that happens on one day at the end of the campaign: Being a lazy low information voter, I will have heard all the smears and other hullabaloo without forming an informed opinion. But at least my vote if I show up, will be based upon the synthesis of all I've heard. I won't be voting nearly as much on the basis of a single snap judgement on a single slanted ad.

So it appears early and mail voting tends to encourage polarizing campaign behavior and an even further degradation in civic engagement. But low information voters are mostly Democratic voters which is why this innovation took off in blue states and why we'll probably see more of it in order to give Dems a (hateful, polarizing) electoral edge.

Read Goldberg's take Why Lena Dunham shouldn't be allowed to vote.