Voting As a Communal Activity

 

Ideally, voting should a communal civic activity, with a holiday set aside and related festivities organized around it. It's also something to which people should apply their critical judgment to the greatest extent possible. For this reason, I'm not an advocate of voting by mail except when it's a practical necessity. Voting by mail means voting early, which means that if you acquire new information close to Election Day after you've already mailed in your ballot, it's too late to change your mind. I don't approve of campaigns encouraging people to vote by mail merely in the name of convenience, since careful and fully informed deliberation, not convenience, should be the priority when it comes to exercising this civic responsibility.

In the spring of 2020 I applied for a mail ballot for the primary election on account of the pandemic. As it so happened, the ballot hadn't arrived by the weekend before the election, so I contacted the office of Al Schmidt, then one of Philadelphia's City Commissioners with whom I'm acquainted, and he swung by on Sunday afternoon to hand me an emergency ballot. I took a few minutes to go to a private spot to fill it out and then seal it, then brought it back to him, whereupon he dropped it in a portable ballot box right in front of me. Now Pennsylvania's secretary of state, he's a real public servant.

Since that primary, I haven't assessed contagion concerns as being sufficiently serious to argue against in-person voting for most people. But as of last November I've become a standby poll worker, serving in a different polling place than my own, so I've resumed voting by mail rather than having to take time out from my duties to go back to my own polling place and vote. My general opposition to voting early stands, however. So, even though my mail ballot arrived yesterday, I don't intend to fill it out and return it until about ten days before the election. That should be sufficient guarantee that it will be received before the deadline.