I remember as a kid accompanying my mom to the elementary school a few blocks from our house. No, not because the principal had called her into the office to talk about my behavior. That came later, in high school and college.
Such as in college, when the dorm manager called my dad at work to tattle on me. He called my dad collect. For people too young to know, that’s when the person making the call instructed the operator to bill the person getting the call, “collecting” the toll. That was back when you paid for long-distance calls by the expensive minute.
Anyway, my dad’s response to the college dorm official was: “Why are you calling me?”
But back to the point of this column. I would walk with my mom into the voting booth and watch while she pulled the levers for the candidates of her choice. This was before punch cards, fill-in-the-oval paper ballots and certainly before touch screens. Voters pulled one mechanical lever to close the curtain on the booth and then pulled more levers to cast their ballots.
I was taught voting was an important responsibility. Even when your candidate lost. The point was to get as many people as possible to the polls so that the election truly represented the will of most of the people. None of that has changed over the decades. If anything, it’s even more important that people vote — the stakes seem to get higher every year.
But what has changed in the past few years is the politically motivated opposition to making it easier for qualified voters to cast their ballots. Instead, some elected officials, some states, some political party leaders want to make it harder.
They say it’s to ensure “election integrity,” even though no one has ever proven large-scale voter fraud. They throw lots of accusations at the walls, ceilings and windows of election offices, hoping something will stick just long enough to pass new laws reducing access to the polls.
Advocates of new restrictions on ballot access believe that targeting and cutting unsupportive voters out of the system will help their candidates win more often. Or at least score points with their supporters for cracking down on non-existent voter fraud.
In Alaska, the governor wants to cut by two-thirds the number of days allowed for early voting, which has become increasingly popular among Alaskans. More than 73,000 people voted early in last November’s statewide election — almost 30% of the total turnout.
Gov. Mike Dunleavy wants to hack the 15-day early voting window down to five days.
He also wants to accelerate the deadline for mailed absentee ballots, changing the law from requiring a postmark by election day to requiring that ballots must be received at the state office by elections day. Which, for rural residents, would mean dropping their ballots in the mail a week or more before the polls close to ensure they arrive on time.
It seems a big problem is impatience.
“These time frames have been in place literally for decades, but the appetite for wanting to know things right away has increased exponentially,” Division of Elections Director Carol Beecher said in a presentation to the House and Senate state affairs committees on Jan. 23.
Don’t make it harder to vote by reducing access just because some people are impatient for the results and want to know things “right away.” Elections are important and take more time than counting the likes on X.
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