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Absentee and Early Voting
by John C. Fortier
Product Group: Book
Publisher: AEI Press (2006-11-25)
ISBN: 0844742473
EAN: 9780844742472
Dewy Decimal #: 324.65
Paperback: 116 pages
SKU: T070653-3943
Condition: Very Good
Comments: Very good overall condition. No writing, very tight binding. Ships same day or next in a bubble mailer. Enjoy.
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Editorial Reviews
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Product Description
Documents the dramatic increase in absentee voting and, more recently, the meteoric rise in early voting. Fortier examines the legal and historical reasons for changes in the voting system and the many differences across states and offers his thoughts about what the changes have meant for the country and where we should go from here.
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Customer Reviews
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A Thoughtful Criticism of Efforts to Expand Absentee Voting
Rating  (5)
Date: 2007-06-02
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
The author of this book is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he serves as the principal contributor to the AEI-Brookings Election Reform Project. The list of AEI fellows, posted at the back of this 2006 book, included former President Gerald Ford, Lynne V. Cheney, the wife of the Vice-President, two 2008 potential Republican Presidential candidates--Newt Gingrich and Fred Thompson--and numerous veterans of Republican Presidential elections.
The author admirably does a superb job of research. Getting data from 50 states and the federal government, he notices gaps and differences in terminology and--rare among researchers--he follows up and fills the gaps and reclassifies the information according to national criteria. In doing so, he provides an excellent model of how national state by state research should work.
The author worries as he documents the increasing trend away from a single voting day and toward increasing use of absentee ballots and early voting. It started with the no-excuses absentee balloting law passed in California in 1978, and it reached its point with Oregon's universal vote by mail plan passed in 1998. Many states have been unaffected or only modestly affected by this trend, my state of Pennsylvania among them, but he warns that the genie can not be put into the bottle and the trend is gathering steam as sthe reform-friendly states are being held up by some as national models.
The author prefers early voting to no-excuses absentee voting. Under early voting, polling places are set up to cover areas much larger than a single precinct before the election at places which attract a large amount of traffic, such as governmental offices and shopping centers. Early voters share in common with regular voters an ability to get to polling places; early voting works best for voters who have no mobility problems but suffer from time constraints on election day.
No-excuses absentee voting, however, allows people with mobility problems a better opportunity to participate. These people tend to be elderly, disabled, low-income and housebound due to duties to take care of children or elderly parents.
The author rightly worries about the integrity of absentee ballots, noting the possibilities of fraud, coercion, or just a desire to please someone else by letting the other person (a more politically concerned spouse, a party worker, a neighbor, a co-worker, etc.) fill out the ballot. He expresses legitimate concerns about the erosion of voter privacy by absentee ballots, and wisely suggests machine readable signature checks as a safeguard. He also notes that directly mailing the ballots to all voters, as Oregon does, removes the opportunity for manipulation of the ballot request process by party workers or others. Certainly, those who work to expand absentee voting should work to devise safeguards to minimize the possibility for fraud or distortion of any voter's viewpoint.
The author helpfully provides charts classifying states by the systems they use. The results of these charts, however, hint at the possibility of a partisan interest. The five states which only allow early voting, the author's preferred reform--Arkansas, North Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and West Virginia--all went for President Bush in the 2000 and 2004 elections.
Of those 11 states with high absentee voting, however, seven--Arizona, California, Iowa, Michigan, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington--went against President Bush at least once, and further, two of the four remaining states--Alaska and Montana--had significant Democratic gains in 2006.
Similarly, four of the nine states with a mix of high absentee and early voting--Hawaii, Maine, Nevada, and New Mexico went against President Bush at least once, and a fifth state--Colorado--scored Democratic gains in 2006.
The low-absentee states are generally the older states. They split 12 to 9 for Bush in 2000, and 11 to 10 for Bush in 2004.
The author does not mention the partisan implications of his recommendations, leaving it to well-informed readers to figure them out. I personally believe it would have been more credible to openly discuss it, but I can understand the case for leaving that discussion to others.
Beyond partisan concerns lie other questions. The author professes admiration for the civic involvement of bringing people together on election days, but dismisses the civic involvement of workers engaging in one to one discussions with voters about absentee ballots. This reviewer believes he is the missing the boat here.
Further and of fundamental importance, the author simply does not address the issue of why people with mobility problems should not be aided to vote. A greater use of absentee ballots is required to help these people, and more days for going to polling places simply does not solve the problem of voting access for people who cannot get to polling polling places without a lot of pain or a lot of inconvenience whenever the polling places are open.
Although I quarrel with the author's apparent blind spots, he is to be commended for putting together a compilation of state and national research that materially moves forward the discussion of how voting should be expanded. Advocates for the elderly, the disabled, the low income and the low-mobility folks in general, however, will need to rely on other works to gain support for the full enfranchisement of these under-represented groups.
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A cutting-edge study as accessible to lay readers as it is to scholars
Rating (5)
Date: 2007-03-06
1 out of 1 customers found this reveiw helpful
Written by American Enterprise Institute research fellow John C. Fortier, Absentee and Early Voting: Trends, Promises, and Perils is examines how nearly a quarter of Americans today vote before election day, either through absentee ballot or early voting places. Absentee and Early voting questions whether or not the convenience of these practices has undermined the integrity of the process and weakened a unifying civic experience. Exploring the legal and historical reasons for alterations in the voting system, as well as the many variations across states, Absentee and Early Voting offers measured, rational conclusions about that changes in the system have meant for the nation across the decades, how America can better protect itself against voter fraud, and what should be America's next step. A cutting-edge study as accessible to lay readers as it is to scholars, Absentee and Early Voting is enthusiastically recommended for political science library and reference shelves.
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Good information on the way we have voted in the past, how we do it today, and what current trends say about the future.
Rating (5)
Date: 2006-11-02
3 out of 3 customers found this reveiw helpful
This study of the rise of absentee and early voting is quite informative. There is more information here about the numbers of votes cast by traditional, early, and absentee methods in each state than I have ever seen. The author admits that some of this data had to be estimated because not all the states collect the information precisely.
John C. Fortier is a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute and is the principal contributor to the election reform project the AEI has with Brookings. While I have a number of civic, logistical, security, integrity, and timing issues with the large us of voting in anyplace than the traditional voting booth on a single election day, I recognize that my view is in the minority and dwindling at that.
I did live in Australia for two years from 1973-75 and saw their universal vote-by-mail system. There and then, if you were of age you faced a fine if you did not return a signed ballot on time. You could vote for Mickey Mouse, but you had to vote. Of course, theirs is a parliamentary system with most of the focus being on electing the local MPs from among a myriad of parties. There are two big parties there, and in those days both were leftish and really left. But their country is larger than the continental United States with something like one tenth of our population (or less). Going to polling places there is simply not practical because so many voters live in amazingly remote areas.
As the author recounts the history of absentee voting to accommodate soldiers during the Civil War and traveling businessmen, he also notes how small a percentage of the electorate this was. It was more symbolic of enfranchisement and civic duty than anything more than a marginal impact on the number of votes cast.
We are then taken through the rise of absentee and early voting. This rapid growth really begins in the 1970s. It first began with the notion that it would expand the participation of more eligible voters, but has proven to be more about convenience than getting new voters. There is some evidence of retaining sometime voters as more regular voters.
However, early voting has proven popular and the percentage of ballots being cast absentee is rising significantly in recent years. Fortier does take us through the pitfalls, but does not provide detailed anecdotes of the problems. He assures us that the problems, while serious to the integrity and confidence of voters in their system, are not significant in number. I am not so sanguine. We have had a great deal of evidence that when third parties get involved in "assisting" in registrations and the handling of ballots that corruption occurs. We get dead people voting, Alzheimer patients voting, and the potential exists in some situations for voting more than once - absentee and at the polling place.
The author offers some general recommendations that emphasize more the early voting, but tightening it up as far as security and in time frame (no more than ten days). For places like Oregon that have gone to 100% voting by mail there is no going back, but there are additional security tools they can add.
This is a good and informative piece. I don't think Fortier goes far enough in exposing the voter fraud that exists today, but I suppose that isn't really the focus of this book.
Recommended to all who are interested in the integrity of our voting process and how it is changing in recent years.
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