Benefits of Early Voting

Despite the election being only a few days past the corner, more than eighty million people have already voted for their desired candidate, whether it be by mail or in person. Most of these individuals who voted early for the election have been found to be in the age ranges of 19 to 28. They cited that their main reason for voting early during this election was the current coronavirus pandemic which has infected millions of people worldwide and can cause some serious symptoms such as nausea, vomiting, trouble breathing, sore throat, as well as a bunch of other side effects. It has been detailed early voters worried that in person voting on election day could cause large numbers of people including themselves to get the virus, as many people use the same polling booths to cast their votes. In response to this outcry, many states have enacted adjustments that would make it much harder for the virus to spread such as ballot drop boxes and a general increase in social distancing for people waiting in lines for in person voting. 

Problems/Disbenefits of Early Voting

While this early voting may seem extremely beneficial, allowing people to vote in a much safer environment by mail or in-person with fewer people crowding around, it does actually have quite a large amount of drawbacks. One of the major disbenefits of this early voting is most certainly that voting by mail is extremely complicated, especially now with this coronavirus outbreak causing many people to vote early by mail rather than in person. Mail in voting can also be easily exploited, with people sending in multiple votes under different aliases. Also, despite people wanting to vote early to avoid getting COVID-19, some states had early in person voting lines that took up entire streets. Now not only was voting early easily fraudulent as people could illegally send in multiple votes by mail, but early in person voting still caused people to get sick. There has also been many claims that early voting has allowed hackers from other nations such as Russia, Iran, and others to hack into voter’s registrations and vote for people which could be a major problem if it is true and influences the results of the election. Early voting’s major issue however was that many people’s ballots were rejected for a variety of reasons and errors, mostly labelled as simply “tardiness”. Nearly all of the  ballots submitted by early voters that were rejected were as a result of them being sent in too late or being sent in without it being signed at all, thus marking it to be worthless and thrown in the trash, wasting an individual’s entire vote. The entire early voting process is simply not entirely stable and as a result, many have opted to wait until election day when it’s the easiest time to vote with no possible way their vote would get rejected.