OPINION:
It was not all that long ago that Election Day was just that — Election Day — not Election Fortnight or Election Month, much less Election Month-and-a-Half.
Now, at 45 days, Virginia’s “early-voting” period is tied for second longest in the country — and unnecessarily so. It is costly to Virginia taxpayers and should be significantly shortened, not just because it would save the state, its 95 counties and 38 independent cities tens of millions of dollars in staffing costs, but also because it would require staffing hundreds of polling stations across the state for weeks on end.
That is not just every four years or even every other year. It is every year because Virginia is virtually alone among the states in holding off-off-year elections for governor and state legislature in years without presidential or congressional elections.
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Early voting in Virginia began Sept. 19, the same day as Vermont and one day after Minnesota and South Dakota, and it runs six days a week through Nov. 3.
By contrast, according to the nonpartisan Vote.org, Oklahoma has only four days of early voting — just Wednesday through Saturday before the traditional “first Tuesday after the first Monday in November” (once known as Election Day).
Kentucky offers just five days. Holdouts Alabama and New Hampshire are hardly disenfranchising their voters because they lack early voting. Somehow, the residents of the Yellowhammer and Granite states are still able to elect public officials the old-fashioned way, on Election Day — with provisions, of course, for traditional absentee balloting for the elderly and infirm and for those traveling or away from home in the military.
Further showing how excessive 45 days of early voting is, even the blue states of New York and New Jersey have just 10 days of early voting. Equally ultraliberal Maryland and the District of Columbia have just 12 days.
In January 2025, then-state Delegate Chad Green proposed trimming Virginia’s 45 days of early voting to 10, which would be comparable to that of the commonwealth’s mid-Atlantic neighbors to the north.
“This was brought to me by some of our electoral board and election workers,” Mr. Green told WTOP-FM radio at the time. “They’re getting burned out.”
“The average cost to have a polling place open … is about $2,500 a day,” he said. “It makes a lot of sense to cut that back to 10 days, and if we did that, it would roughly save about $12 million in direct savings.”
In addition to arguing that 45 days is “way too long” and administratively burdensome, Mr. Green said a shorter early-voting period would also reduce the risk of election fraud.
Then there is the matter of what used to be called an electoral October surprise — the revelation of a scandal involving a candidate that would surface in the final week or two of a campaign, with the potential to sink his or her chances.
Yet buyer’s remorse does not apply to elections.
If early voting has been underway for weeks and tens of thousands of ballots have already been cast before a scandal surfaces or a candidate’s character flaws are revealed, voters cannot very well take back their votes.
Exhibit A for that is Virginia Attorney General Jay Jones, a Democrat whose successful candidacy last year benefited from two weeks of early voting having taken place before his hateful and vicious text messages from 2022 were leaked to news media on Oct. 3.
In those texts, Mr. Jones had wished for two bullets to the head of the then-speaker of the Virginia House of Delegates, a Republican, and for the killing of the speaker’s two young children.
Democrats held narrow majorities in both houses of the Virginia General Assembly when Mr. Green proposed dialing back early voting, so his sensible bill never made it to the desk of then-Gov. Glenn Youngkin for his signature.
Now, with larger Democratic legislative majorities and a Democratic governor in office, the 45-day window, however gratuitous, is not going away anytime soon.
That said, the next time Virginia Republicans win the governorship and control of the General Assembly — which regrettably cannot happen now until the 2029 state elections at the soonest — early voting should be cut back to a more reasonable, less-expensive period.
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