My wife and I voted yesterday, and I wish we couldn’t have.

As with most Republicans, I think early voting as a general rule is a terrible idea. Not that there shouldn’t be exceptions, of course, as there have been for…I don’t know how long, but seemingly forever. Absentee ballots are an important accommodation for people who can’t vote in person on election day.

But in general? Early voting should be outlawed. Instead we have been steadily expanding the practice, and it more than anything else has decreased both election security and trust in the election process.

The election security case is easy to make and almost not worth making. The 2005 Carter-Baker Commission made recommendations to ensure both greater election security and voter confidence in elections, and Democrats have fought tooth and nail against every almost every one of the recommendations.

• A national system to connect state and local voter registration lists to ensure clean voter rolls
• Voter identification based on a universally available REAL ID card
• Policies to improve voter access for all communities, as well as innovations like vote centers and voter information lookup sites
• Stronger efforts to combat fraud, especially in absentee voting
• Auditable paper backups for all voting technology

Increased access–but with less accountability to ensure that all votes are legitimate, is the only one of these that the Democrats even make a nod to supporting. They reject election security and even its appearance out of hand. They object to clean voter rolls. They object to anything that makes it hard to cheat.

The Carter-Baker Commission emphasized the obvious: absentee ballots are by far the least secure method to vote. It’s not even close. And given the spoils attached to winning elections, you are an obvious liar if you argue that nobody would want to or try to cheat. People cheat for much much less than control over trillions of dollars of spending, the most powerful law enforcement agencies in the world, regulatory power over every aspect of the economy, and control over the greatest military in the world.

People cheat at golf and corn hole. They will cheat in elections if you make it possible, even easy. If you are actually sincere in arguing otherwise you need a straight jacket.

Do I know how much cheating happens in elections, and to what extent outcomes are effected?

Of course not.

Current election security measures make it almost impossible to even begin to guess. I hope it isn’t much, but some things really stink. We keep on being told otherwise and that extensive audits prove otherwise, but do you trust the people arguing this? I don’t. I want election security, not assurances from people who hate my guts.

I don’t for a second believe that all the pundits who scream about “election deniers” are sincere in their arguments, and am very certain that many of those same people are about to attack the integrity of this and the 2024 election.

Many have started already. There are lots of examples, but I love this one from election denier HRC

HILLARY CLINTON: “Right wing extremists already have a plan to literally steal the next presidential election.”

pic.twitter.com/gUfkiy5206

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) October 25, 2022

One simple and fair way to tamp down the discord is to heavily restrict early voting. Not only does doing so make cheating harder, it makes the appearance of cheating decline.

When ABC makes its case about the ‘Red Mirage,” they are noting a real phenomenon without acknowledging how problematic it is: Democrats and Republicans use early voting at different rates, meaning that early votes–which are counted later, actually, in many cases–are counted often after election night and change the momentum in the vote count.

This creates an obvious appearance of cheating–even if and when there is none. Having the election night returns show a Republican victory that appears to be overturned after some opaque process days later sure looks like cheating. It undermines confidence in elections. And given how sketchy some of the practices are, probably should.

Republicans are going to inevitably feel cheated, and Democrats apparently are fine with that. They just insult us with schoolyard taunts–and refuse to concede for a moment even the most modest election security measures are necessary.

Another, equally important factor in why early voting sucks is easily seen in the polls–over the past couple weeks, in a period where voting in some cases has gone on for weeks–the trend has shifted in the polls.

For instance, many people had voted for Fetterman before his disastrous debate performance. Early voting began in the middle of September, long before people had nearly enough information to make a rational choice. These people had been deceived by the Fetterman campaign and the media into believing his brain worked well, when it clearly doesn’t.

This should not have happened. Those voters who would have changed their mind were literally cheated out of their votes–worse, Fetterman and the Democrats got their votes through fraud. Election day voting would have prevented this.

Absentee balloting should be reserved for absentees, not available to everyone.

Getting off your a$$ to vote is not too much to ask if you want to have a voice.