OPINION:
Early voting in Virginia’s off-year legislative elections, underway on a limited scale since Sept. 22, ramped up big time on Thursday. In Fairfax County, the state’s most populous jurisdiction, the number of early voting polling stations jumped from three to 16.
All 140 seats in the General Assembly — 100 in the House of Delegates, 40 in the state Senate — are up for grabs, with GOP Gov. Glenn Youngkin’s legislative agenda hanging in the balance. To have a chance of enacting that agenda, Republicans need to hold their narrow majority in the House and flip Democrats’ equally slim advantage in the Senate.
But that will be difficult to do unless Republican voters can overcome their well-documented aversion to early voting and produce the turnout needed for Republicans to reclaim full control of the General Assembly.
Only then will it be possible to dial back the gratuitously long 45-day early voting period, and perhaps even restore the traditional one-day Election Day, which had served the country perfectly well for generations.
The longer the voting period runs, the more time there is for mischief.
On Nov. 2, 2000, five days before the presidential election that year, news broke that Republican nominee George W. Bush had been arrested for drunken driving some 24 years earlier in Kennebunkport, Maine.
News of the 1976 DUI arrest was a belated “October surprise,” unearthed by supporters of Mr. Bush’s Democratic opponent, then-Vice President Al Gore, and leaked to the news media to hurt the Bush campaign. Mr. Bush won the election anyway by narrowly carrying Florida and thus winning the bare minimum 270 votes in the Electoral College.
A Gallup Poll at the time suggested that 10% of independents were less likely to vote for Mr. Bush as a result of news coverage of the DUI charge. That conceivably could have been enough to deprive him of a clean win, which would have spared our country weeks of recounts and litigation.
What we do know is that there was no “voter remorse” among early Bush voters because there was no early voting in 2000. With the possible exception of a small number of absentee-ballot voters, everyone knew of the Bush DUI before casting their ballots and voted for him anyway.
The same can’t be said of Pennsylvanians in 2022, when the Keystone State elected Democrat John Fetterman to the U.S. Senate.
Mr. Fetterman, whose speaking ability had been greatly impaired by a stroke, strategically held off debating his Republican rival, Dr. Mehmet Oz, until Oct. 25, two weeks before traditional Election Day. By then, according to data released by the Pennsylvania Department of State, a total of 556,750 mail-in and absentee ballots already had been returned. By all indications, the Democrat won a large majority of those votes.
None of them had seen Mr. Fetterman’s embarrassingly bad debate performance before voting, but it didn’t matter how many of those who cast ballots for him beforehand had voter remorse, because they couldn’t take them back even if they wanted to.
Early voting encourages casting a ballot before all the facts are in. If Republicans win full control of the Virginia General Assembly on Nov. 7, curbing early voting should be at the top of the agenda.
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