The other day, I wrote a post about voter registration, and why I don’t think people should be allowed to have voter registration events or even allowed to walk around randomly soliciting people to register.

On a related note, yesterday was the first day of voting for the November elections, and second to my disdain for registration drives is early voting.

I can’t say that I have an adequate history on how early voting began – or why anyone even allowed it to be legal. There are a number of issues with it, as far as I can tell.

First, the more time that people have to vote, the more time there is for unsupervised voter fraud. When we were all voting on one day, there was only one day to commit whatever fraud one was intent on committing. But with more than a month, there’s plenty of time.

Along with that, there are also so many more variables when there are mail-in ballots, drop boxes and now the possibility of online voting (not yet happening, I realize).

Any student of history or politics knows that a lot can happen in one month. A lot can happen in one day. With early voting starting now, there are people who are voting before the first presidential debate even happens.  Presidential debates are often significant events in the course of an election, and to have voting before they even happen is wrong.

Plus, who knows what else is going to be revealed about a candidate or what event may happen that illustrates the true competence – or incompetence – of an incumbent or candidate.

But finally, my biggest problem with it goes back to my problems with voter registration – we have one day to vote, and people who want to vote will make time for it.

If out of 365 days, it is inconvenient for someone to vote, it is probably not important enough to them to do it. In my view, there are way too many people who are voting because they’re being encouraged to – whether by guilt, bribe, peer pressure or otherwise.

And the single voting day should be standing in line, where every voter can be monitored and people counts will match vote counts.  In Washington State, we can’t even stand in line to vote. The excitement of going to the polling booth and taking our kids is gone. Now we fill out a mailed ballot – weeks before the election – and that’s that. It’s hard to make that a momentous and important event for the kids.

If voting isn’t on someone’s radar, it shouldn’t be put there by someone else.  People can do what they want – including following the relevant news of their own country. If they choose not to follow that, then I’m fine with them not voting.

- My name is Jon Friesch, and your comments are always welcome.