The Voting Season in the Rearview Mirror

Before the voting season that has just passed us by recedes any further into the rearview mirror, I would like to offer a few random thoughts on the subject.

(1) I don’t like early voting. Many states allow it, no questioned asked. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there’s just something not right about that. If we’re going to let people arbitrarily vote weeks in advance, then why have the pretense of an official day to vote? I think early (absentee) voting should be allowed only for those who have a legitimate excuse as to why they can’t vote on Election Day. That’s the way my home state of Virginia handles it. I would like to see other states adopt this policy.

(2) I was lucky when I voted. I voted after work (as I customarily do) and it took all of about five minutes for me to get out of my car, enter my polling place, cast my vote, exit, and get back in my car. And it wouldn’t have taken that long if the guy in front of me hadn’t been challenged by poll workers because the address on his ID didn’t match the address they had on their roll for him.

Most of my co-workers, on the other hand, decided to “beat the crowd” by voting in the morning before coming to work. But you know what happens when everyone tries to beat the crowd. As a consequence, the majority of them had to wait in line in the rain for at least a half hour.

They are obviously more dedicated voters than I. While I make a habit of voting at nearly every election, I’m not going to allow myself to be inconvenienced by it. If I would have concluded that I’d be waiting in line in the rain for more than just a handful of minutes, I would have left without voting. Yes, as a U.S. citizen, I value my privilege to vote, but I’m realistic about it, i.e., I don’t see it making that much of a difference.

(3) The turnout for this election was quite impressive. It’s too bad voters don’t turn out in numbers like that at every election. Elections at the state and local levels are just as important – perhaps even more so – as presidential elections. Yet, I’ll bet few voters will encounter long lines at their next city council election, for example.

4) This year, I broke a personal tradition by not watching Election Night coverage on NBC. This tradition dated back to the time I was a small child, when my family would gather around the TV set to watch John Chancellor and David Brinkley deliver the election returns.

Oh, I started to watch NBC this time as well, but I couldn’t stick with it. It was something about the way they have changed their set and graphics that didn’t sit well with me. I guess it just wasn’t ergonomically correct. Of course, it wasn’t as bad as ABC, which had so many things moving across the screen at the same time that it was almost unwatchable.

One other factor that likely prompted me to abandon NBC was the fact that I missed the late Tim Russert and his whiteboard. Election Night on NBC just wasn’t the same without him.

Anyway, I finally settled on CNN. I thought its graphics were very clear and concise. I also liked CNN’s set, although I still can’t figure out how they did that hologram thing with correspondent Jessica Yellin. In addition, I found most of its analysts extremely knowledgeable. I was particularly impressed with John King’s astute analysis. He was the closest thing to Russert I could find that night.

5) Speaking of CNN, one of its commentators did get me a bit irked. On the Friday before the election, senior political analyst Gloria Borger came up with a cock and bull story to defend the inaccuracy of the polls heading into the New Hampshire Democratic primary. One of the other CNN analysts had brought this up in an effort to caution Barack Obama’s supporters to not get too complacent about his lead over John McCain in the pre-election polls.

To explain why Obama lost the New Hampshire primary to Hillary Clinton despite being ahead in all the polls, Borger asserted that polling actually stopped four days before the primary and therefore did not capture the late-breaking shift in voter sentiment toward Clinton. This claim is patently false.

Polls were conducted by several polling services right up to the day of the primary. Obama was ahead in all of the polls that were taken within two days of the primary and even lead in all the exit polls. Still, as it turned out, Clinton surprised everyone by winning. Borger just couldn’t bring herself to admit that the polls missed it.

Besides, her story makes no sense. The Iowa caucuses were held on January 3. The New Hampshire primary was held just five days later on January 8. Why would the pollsters have suddenly stopped polling New Hampshire voters the day after the Iowa caucuses – the very time when the public would be the most interested in such polls? But that’s apparently what Borger would have us believe. I emailed her this same rebuttal, but she never responded, of course. In fact, she was still stubbornly pushing her flawed argument on Election Night, even after Anderson Cooper had tried to set the record straight.