Vote Early Day is a movement of nonprofits, businesses, election administrators, and creatives working to ensure all Americans know their options to vote early. I wanted to call attention to this very important day of recognition for a way people are helping to minimize Election Day lines at the polls and ensure that more and more votes are secured.
Sure, there will always be people who enjoy voting in-person on the day of the election because of the excitement and energy that goes into the spirit of November 3. I absolutely do not blame those people - voting is exciting! Filling in the bubble for your chosen candidate in a physical booth and dropping your ballot into the fancy machine can give you a fun rush of adrenaline.
I also understand the urge to mail in your vote, given the pandemic we are still in, and work schedules that do not allow for people to go vote on the day of. I never worried about mail-in votes not being counted until Trump waged a war on the post office - one of America’s most important institutions. I am not discouraging mail-in voting since I chose that method, but we have to take all factors into account. If you do choose mail-in voting, remember that it is highly recommended to not actually mail the ballot, but to drop it off at your local town hall’s drop box if applicable. Unfortunately, states like Texas have very few drop boxes, so if your state is lucky enough to have them, use them!
It is despicable how Election Day is not a nationally recognized holiday and yet Christopher Columbus still gets us the day off. Lol America. I could also go on about the lack of civics education in schools. These are all factors in the system’s way of undermining our civic duty to each and every one of our fellow Americans. So we must take advantage of the ways in which we can fight back against a system that wants to maintain its power over people instead of giving people the power.
I recently saw a tweet that sees the election as a two-week long period rather than a one day affair:
We need to consider the amount of impact that voting before Election Day holds. With the nationwide worry over COVID-19’s negative effect on mailing operations, the act of voting early is one way to simply make election day less stressful for poll workers and, in turn, strengthens our democracy. Many polling places also do not have adequate resources and election results suffer from this underfunding.
I am lucky to live in Massachusetts, a state that allows for early voting, but for other states such as Connecticut and Delaware, voting early is not available. We have to keep pushing for more states to adopt this way of voting so that no one has to doubt whether they will be able to use their inalienable right.
The first cited form of early voting was when Louisiana established “in-person absentee voting” in 1921. It has been almost 100 years since voting was innovated, other than absentee, of course. Let’s take advantage of the ways voting has become more accessible so that all of our voices may be heard. For more information about this movement, go to voteearlyday.org.
Happy Vote Early Day!
(I do not own the cover photo to this article.)
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