Hi, friends:
A Sunday evening thread as I watch the Phillies take it yard and read dKos diaries about early voting.
Which brings me to the questions - why all the fuss about early voting?
Yes, I voted early for Obama, and I'm participating in get out the vote efforts here in Indiana.
But it seems that there's a conceptual flaw in the form of an unexamined assumption in all the talk about "votes in the bank". Let's explore that below the fold.
As a long time poll watcher, I understand the reason for voting early in terms of shortening lines, allowing poll workers to help new voters find their right precinct, etc.
Voting early also allows the party workers to narrow the number of registered voters they need to call on election day to be sure they voted. all that I understand.
But many of the diaries here examine the increased percentage of Democrats who voted early compared with Republicans, or the percentage of African-Americans who voted early compared with their percentage in the last election, and get very excited about that, as though this fact automatically means there will be a huge increase in that demographic in the final result.
It may mean that, but only if the same number of Democrats, or African-Americans vote on election day itself as voted on the previous election day.
In other words, the question is whether this increase in favorable percentages in early voting reflects additional voters in general, or whether it simply represents a shift in the timing of the same number of voters. Just because, for instance, the Obama campaign is getting their voters to the polls early doesn't mean the total number will go up. It's quite possible that the percentage of republican voters vis a vis Democratic voters on election day will go up, simply because more Democrats than Republicans voted early.
I know that there has been a huge increase in new registered voters, and that the party affiliation of these new voters generally favors Democrats. And while we hope and believe that many of these newly registered voters will actually vote, I'm not sure the early votes tell us that these people are voting rather than that a higher percentage of exiting voters have voted early.
I'm not sure that I'm explaining my question correctly. But I'm looking forward to a discussion of this question.