After all, presumably, if there were no early voting, but still registration was allowed until Oct. 6th, this would be just as good for Obama, since the people they registered would simply vote on election day rather than early. Here are the arguments that I thought of:
- There tend to be longer lines on election day in cities where Obama will do well, and thus early voting reduces the number of people in those precincts who won't be able to vote on election day because of long lines.
- When you register a new voter, and they can vote that same day, they are probably more likely to vote at all (rather than stay home) because they are in political mode, and there is the added pressure of a campaign person just having registered them and talked to them about the importance of political participation. Since Obama is registering more new voters, this helps him more. This might be a particularly large effect if, as the article claims, most of the early voting focus is on campuses, given that young people are traditionally the most likely not to turnout on election day.
- When you register a voter and they vote the same day, it is less likely they will vote for the other candidate (assuming you had some way of picking out which voters were heavily or leaning towards obama on that particular day) because there is no chance for an exogenous shock to change their vote. If these voters waited around till November, they might switch to McCain because, for instance, Captain Insanopublishes a tell-all book about his life as Obama's preacher. Of course, some of the people mccain registered early might switch to obama, but again if obama is registering more, this benefits him more.
- Because Obama has the much better/larger ground organization in Ohio (or so I am told), multiple days of using that organization for actual votes allows him to multiply that advantage. Think about it this way: lets say Obama has 1000 staffers/volunteers and McCain has 500, and on each day a staffer or volunteer can reach 10 people. Then if people can only vote on one day, Obama's advantage is 10,000 to 5,000 (or only 5,000). But if people can vote on 10 different days, then Obama's advantage is 100,000 to 50,000 (or 50,000). Now obviously this is an oversimplification that ignores gigantic declining marginal returns, since voter contact before election day is probably much less likely to lead to a vote than on election day, because people are waiting to make up their minds, people are generally sheep who will wait to vote on election day, etc. But I think there probably is an effect here.
Any other reasons people can think of? I don't think early voting is as big a deal as the article makes it out to be, but then again, if the above reasoning is correct, it could make a difference on the margin, and in Ohio, the margin will almost certainly be very small.
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