One of the more surprising results from last Tuesday’s elections was the victory of Democrat Jay Jones in the Virginia Attorney General race. Jones had been mired in multiple scandals, including apparently misleading a court about the nature of community service performed for a reckless driving charge, and leaked text messages showing him fantasizing about murdering a former Republican colleague and wishing death on children.
When these stories broke, most election analysts assumed Jones was politically finished. But these pundits failed to consider the Old Dominion’s protracted early voting process.
By the time the text message scandal broke on October 3, Virginians had already been voting for more than two weeks, with hundreds of thousands of votes already banked. Jones’s margin of victory was 194,475 votes out of 3,311,991 ballots cast. He may well have lost were it not for early voting.
Virginia’s protracted early voting period is by no means unique. Fully 47 states allow no-excuse early voting—both in-person and by mail. Its advocates argue that early voting eases Election Day congestion by reducing long lines and wait times at polling places, as well as ensuring that bad weather or unforeseen emergencies don’t inhibit people from voting.
Proponents likewise claim that early voting improves poll worker performance, allows election officials time to correct registration errors, and allows for fixing voting system problems with greater ease. They also inevitably insist that racism is behind any attempt to reduce the length of time devoted to in-person early voting and denounce all efforts to add common-sense security features for mail-in ballots.
Nonetheless, as the Jay Jones scandal clearly illustrates, it is obvious that extensive and universal early voting can create a quiet crisis of democracy.
The voters who cast their ballots weeks before Election Day often have far less information about the candidates and the issues than do their counterparts who wait to vote until Election Day. When there are late-breaking developments in campaigns (the fabled “October surprise”) that are self-evidently important to the choices made by voters, those who have already cast their ballots are stuck with their choices.
The recent election isn’t the first time Virginia has illustrated this problem. In 2021, early voting had begun two weeks before Democrat Terry McAuliffe committed his now-famous debate blunder, where he stated that parents shouldn’t be telling schools what to teach.
In a far more consequential example, in 2020, millions of Americans had already cast their ballots by the time the Hunter Biden laptop scandal broke. It is entirely possible that early voting and the Big Tech cover-up of the story changed the outcome of that election.
All of which begs the question: Whatever happened to Election Day? Until a couple of decades ago, voting in the United States was a straightforward exercise that required registered voters to appear at local polling places on Election Day and cast their ballots in person. A small number were permitted to vote absentee if they were stationed overseas in the military or could show that they were otherwise unable to get to the polls.
This system, with a few minor variations, was used in all 50 states and revealed the winners of most elections with alacrity. Though not perfect, it was generally efficient, secure, and implicitly trusted by the vast majority of voters.
Nonetheless, in the late 1990s, Democrats began pushing for a number of fundamental changes to this system. They insisted that it contained all manner of vaguely defined flaws, but the actual impetus for “reform” was their decreasing ability to win majorities in federal and state elections.
From 1980 through 2004, for example, no Democrat presidential nominee received a majority of the popular vote. Not even Bill Clinton managed to reach 50 percent in either of his White House wins. Meanwhile, in 1994, Democrats lost control of Congress, and they were increasingly losing control of state legislatures and governorships all across the country.
Consequently, the new millennium ushered in a big Democrat push for the least secure alternative to the voting model described above: all mail-in elections combined with early voting. Oregon was the first state to enact such a system in 2000. Now, eight states have all-mail elections — California, Colorado, Hawaii, Nevada, Oregon, Utah, Vermont, and Washington. All of these states send everyone on their voter rolls postage-paid ballots, which are returned by the USPS and vote harvesters both before and after Election Day.
Inevitably, all but one of these states became Democrat fiefdoms in which Republican candidates for office rarely win.
The increased emphasis on mail-in voting in these states, and every other blue state, has created a disincentive for them to keep their voter rolls clean. Consequently, despite the requirements of federal law, they refuse to remove deceased, duplicate, and non-resident voters from their rolls. They also decline to remove registrants with birth dates that indicate the voters are impossibly old.
By allowing such registrants to accumulate on their voter rolls, these states are able to mail out ballots, which can be harvested and used to commit fraud. According to a report from the Public Interest Legal Foundation, the worst offender is California:
After accounting for polling place votes and rejected ballots in November 2022, there were more than 10 million ballots left outstanding, meaning election officials do not know what happened to them. It is fair to assume that the bulk of these were ignored or ultimately thrown out by the intended recipients. But, under mass mail elections, we can only assume what happened. Mail voting practices have an insurmountable information gap. The public cannot know how many ballots were disregarded, delivered to wrong mailboxes, or even withheld from the proper recipient by someone at the same address.
Early voting and metastasizing mail-in ballots are just the most obvious assaults on the integrity of our elections.
If the Republicans want to restore trust and integrity in our elections, they must pass national election reform, and President Trump must sign it into law as soon as possible. Ideal legislation would require all voters to provide a photo ID and citizenship verification. It must mandate quick and accurate reporting of results by requiring all ballots to arrive by Election Day except for military personnel stationed overseas. Finally, the legislation must ban universal mail-in elections and ballot harvesting, while limiting early voting to a single week before Election Day.
Naturally, the Democrats and their legacy media mouthpieces will denounce this as an attack on “our democracy.” But Article I, Section 4, Clause 1 of the U.S. Constitution gives Congress the last word on how we conduct elections: “The Times, Places and Manner of holding Elections for Senators and Representatives, shall be prescribed in each State by the Legislature thereof; but the Congress may at any time by Law make or alter such Regulations.”
The one major hurdle standing in the way is the Senate filibuster rule. Democrats have made clear that they will never allow common-sense election reforms to clear the upper chamber.
But – for better or for worse – that roadblock may be coming down. If it does, Republicans should seize the moment and act without delay.
Editor’s Note: AMAC Action has been involved in numerous advocacy efforts to pass Voter ID, ban non-citizen voting, and enact other common-sense election integrity measures in states throughout the country. AMAC members played a critical role in securing more than a dozen election integrity victories in 2024 alone.
David Catron is a Senior Editor at the American Spectator. His writing has also appeared in PJ Media, the American Thinker, the Providence Journal, the Catholic Exchange and a variety of other publications.
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