Early voting (EV) is a recent development in American democracy. The 2008 election was the first time EV was used extensively in presidential elections. And in the 2012 election, the courts began to confront for the first time the issue of how to understand early voting as a legal matter, including for purposes of constitutional law. The most significant election litigation in 2012 involved early voting, with cases in Ohio and Florida (including cases litigated the weekend of the election) leading to more than 106,000 people in Ohio alone making use of judicial decisions to vote the weekend before the election. If we reason by analogy, the question is whether early voting should be thought about more like election-day voting or like absentee voting. Is EV best understood, legally, as expanding election day back in time a bit, so that the legal and constitutional framework should be thought about much like the framework that applies to election day in general? Or is EV best understood as like traditional absentee voting, in which States have long made decisions about which groups of voters have sufficiently good “excuses” for not being able to show up on election day to justify their access to an absentee ballot? This was one of the fundamental questions underlying the Obama campaign’s constitutional challenge to Ohio’s “decision” (I will explain the quotes later) to open early voting to some voters but not others the weekend before the election — i.e., military and overseas voters.
