The nice thing about the Virginian-Pilot printing my Letter to the Editor is that I can post what they edited here on Bearing Drift.
Here’s the Director’s Cut.
The Virginian-Pilot is clear in supporting “early voting” in its recent editorial. What isn’t clear is why it would support an initiative that will undoubtedly make elections and campaigns more expensive and less competitive.
Not every campaign is a Presidential race where most voters have essentially decided their choice by Labor Day. Actually, many of the campaigns in Virginia are local: for City Council, School Board, and Board of Supervisors. By and large, these local campaigns don’t have the budgets for months of advertising through television, mail and newspapers. Very few candidates can afford more than a week or two.
Open up the early voting model in Virginia, and either early voters will cast votes in these races about people they know nothing about, or early voters will skip these races entirely. They’ll have no choice, because candidates won’t be able to afford to tell them anything about themselves.
Neither of these results furthers the cause of Democracy that the Virginian-Pilot seeks to advance with early voting
In fact, the Virginian-Pilot’s minimal coverage of these local races makes their early voting advocacy so curious to me. If they’d like voters to vote so early, why do they dedicate so little space in the newspaper to reporting about these campaigns?
It seems to me the least the Pilot can do while encouraging the General Assembly to allow voters to cast votes six weeks before Election Day is to make a serious commitment to campaign reporting beyond the one or two race profiles that are printed in the typical City Council campaign in the closing weeks.
The intrinsic and direct result of early voting will be the need for campaigns to stretch their paid advertising budget from the last few weeks in October to the entire post-Labor Day season. In some cases, that would quadruple the average local campaign cost and make local campaigns even more dependent upon campaign donors than it ever has before.
While that would prove a hardship for most City Council candidates, especially challengers who would need to rethink whether they should even run, it would eviscerate School Board candidates. School Board candidates are either self-funded or underfunded and barely raise enough to purchase campaign signs and a small newspaper ad in the final week. How can they compete if the voting season is six weeks long?
Some other changes might assist in the efforts to educate voters and give them something to vote on six weeks early other than a name, but I’m not sure the Virginian-Pilot would embrace them as they’ve embraced early voting.
Partisan local elections would at least give some idea to voters about the candidates for which they’d be casting votes. It’s the reason early voting doesn’t impact federal or state elections as negatively, coupled with the fact that virtually all Congressional and Senate campaigns advertise heavily in September already.
But with an R or a D next to a candidate, voters will at least have some information and identification with local candidates. Undecided voters don’t clamor to vote early. It’s the partisan voter whose mind was made up when their Party nominated a candidate who is likely to vote early. If City Council races offered similar Party clarity on their ballots, it would mitigate the negative impacts on voters who cast votes for Congress and wonder who these 10 candidates running for City Council are.
That’s just for November races. Early voting in May elections makes no sense to me at all. Cities that hold their local elections in May do not exactly have the problem of too many people showing up on Election Day, with turnout routinely below 20%. If we encourage May voters to vote early, we may have to institute a program designed to keep election officials awake during the first Tuesday in May.
But May campaigns will face the same problems with early voting that their November counterparts will: Longer advertising, ballooning campaign costs, lack of media coverage, and the resulting fewer people willing to run because we’ve made the costs for mounting a campaign too high to be competitive.
Unless the Virginian-Pilot is going to advocate more expensive campaigns, less competitive races, a very high level of campaign reporting coverage, and partisan identification of candidates to help voters make informed choices, its support for opening the early voting floodgates is, in my opinion, premature.
