Emergency measures to deal with an unprecedented crisis aside, the problem with mail-in voting, early voting, and (God help us) online voting is that we do have a positive civic interest in voting being just enough of a chore to make people take it seriously.
This is not to say that voters should be pointlessly or excessively inconvenienced. Measures that make voting easier, or harder, should be sensibly discussed. But we would not be doing ourselves any favors by making voting so easy that it no longer seems like a Big Deal.
Hasn't social media taught us some unmistakable lessons about how behavior and attitudes change as the perceived VALUE of a task diminishes? If you have to work for something, it seems more valuable to you, so you treat it more carefully. That's just human nature.
We really should have learned that lesson from the sad history of the Great Society welfare state. The fastest way to destroy something is to "give" it to people for "free" with assurances they are "entitled" to it. What no one owns, no one cares for.
Social media makes this comically obvious, with lessons delivered at hyper-speed a thousand times a day. Twitter offers instant communication with absolutely zero cost or effort. The result is... messy. It's a dark virtual fairyland with little connection to the real world.
People say things on social media they would never say out loud, things they probably wouldn't have written in a letter to the editor, or even in a letter to friends. They say things they might hesitate to spray-paint on a wall as graffiti. Careers are destroyed in an instant.
It would be fascinating to observe how much social media behavior changed if even the tiniest cost or effort was involved - if you bought Tweets in packs of 500 for a dime, or if posts had to be reviewed by the author an hour after they were written before going live.
Voting is a form of expression, of communication, and it follows similar principles of perceived value. We already have problems with people who think their "vote doesn't matter" so they put little thought into their choices, or vote for the worst and craziest just to have fun.
If we made voting a web form you could knock out in a few seconds and gave people weeks to complete it, maybe with convenient "Vote for All Democrats/Republicans" straight-party buttons, the result would be disastrous even if the system was absolutely secure and hack-proof.
And even then, we'd still get complaints from activists that voting was too hard, the barriers too high, the voter identification system too strict. What about people who can't get to a computer in ten seconds flat? The app is too hard to use on smartphones!
Some early voting to relieve intense congestion at polling places, some mail-in ballots for those who have great difficulty making to the polls, is understandable, but we're already making it so easy that it's become thoughtless. Too many ballots cast before campaigns are over.
The impulse of the Information Age is to make everything faster and easier. It's laudable in most cases, a boon to our lives, with benefits that would have boggled the mind 20 or 30 years ago. But we should remember human nature and avoid devaluing certain things too much. /end
