I went to my nearest polling place tonight, at Northeast High School in Anne Arundel County.
It took me nine minutes to vote.
Not inside the polling place. Not to get a ballot. But from the time I got out of my car until the time I got back in my car to leave the polling place.
There was no line.
There was no hassle.
There were no problems.
I have seen similar sentiments in the local area from other area residents on Facebook,
I have seen from time to time nonsense from the left, both in Maryland and beyond, that standing in line to vote is “voter suppression.”
None of that tonight. Why? Because I went at an off-peak time. I rolled into the parking lot at 7:33 PM, 27 minutes before the early voting center closed for the night.
Want to know why there was a line Monday morning? Because everybody decided to go at the first possible moment to go early vote. Early voting locations are open 13 hours a day, and yet hundreds of people decided to show up at 7 am on the very first day of doing it.
Everybody showing up to vote at once is not a government conspiracy to make it harder to vote…..
Furthermore, here in Maryland, there are eight days of early voting, followed the next day by Election Day itself. That gives votes a full 117 hours worth of opportunities to vote in person. That doesn’t count the no-fault absentee voting opportunities and the dozens of absentee ballot dropoff locations available to voters.
Once again, voters have been given a never-ending menu of ways to participate in this election.
So when I hear people saying that lining up at a polling place is “voter suppression,” I get angry. Because saying a long line is voter suppression delegitimizes the electoral process. It delegitimizes our elected officials. And it minimizes the actual voter suppression that has been inflicted upon voters, both here and abroad, over the course of the last hundred years or more.
Glad that your experience worked well. Not all voters have good flexibility to go off peak. If you raise the price of virtually any good, you get less demand for the good and voting is no different. Make it difficult to vote with long lines and or bad weather and you get less voting. Voter suppression can take many forms. Closing polling places, restrictive hours, short early voting periods, and restrictive id laws are the main tools. I remember once reading a few years ago that at least one area in the country was requiring birth certificates from college students to vote.
Maryland's system that you have to request an absentee ballot and you have to sign it seems very reasonable to me. There are cameras at many drop off boxes and election centers to visual record your effort to vote. Required signature on vote by mail as well as voting in a polling place would provide further evidence of someone trying to vote twice or illegally. Widespread voter fraud has been shown to be a myth. Continued efforts to suppress the vote by making voting difficult by at least one major party in this country is not a myth.
Brian - please consider doing a piece on how much all this "early voting" and such costs the taxpayers in MD. Wheaton library in MoCo was staffed by a small cadre of people. Many sitting at tables twiddling their thumbs (this was on Saturday afternoon). How much does early voting cost to staff and set-up? How much does it "help turnout" or increase participation in our republic? The local politicians never talk about that (they never talk about fiscal common sense in general). How much money is being thrown at a WEEK of early voting? Millions! For what? Meanwhile the machine politicians in MoCo fight us on ending "At Large" voting blocks to keep their power base and DILUTE votes outside of a few neighborhoods! It really is a game. All for show.