By Chris Satullo

So, Mayor Pete voter from North Carolina, are you happy about that early vote you cast?

Hey, Amy Klobuchar backer in Minnesota, aren’t you thrilled you got to cast your mail-in ballot for her in mid-February?

In the stunning four-day period spanning Joe Biden’s South Carolina win and his most excellent Super Tuesday, voters by the hundreds of thousands discovered to their pain that they’d voted for candidates who’d dropped out of the contest by the time votes were tallied.

That’s a lousy feeling. 

And the pain is not just that the person you favored had faltered so badly.  Anyone who cast a vote for Klobuchar, Buttigieg, Tom Steyer or, yes, even Andrew Wang also lost their chance to weigh in on the real, and highly consequential, decision now facing Democrats: Uncle Joe or Bernie Bros?

Overall, more than 4 million people used early voting on Super Tuesday. (Many of them, obviously, voted for candidates still in the race.)

Starting, as so many reform ideas do, on the Left Coast, the vogue for early voting has been sweeping the nation in recent years (36.6 percent of votes in 2016, up from 16 percent in 2000). Forty states (Pennsylvania the latest) allow some form of it that goes beyond the traditional absentee ballot allowed anyone who provides evidence they can’t vote on election day.

The common forms of early voting are by mail (27 states and D.C.) and in-person at designated early voting sites (33 states and D.C.)  Early voting periods range from four to 45 days before Election Day, with an average of 19 days. (After the hacking concerns of 2016, some states flirtation with online voting has mostly died down).

Early voting all sounds so logical and attuned to the needs and convenience of voters.

And I’ve always thought it was a bad idea.  So, you can’t expect me to pass up the chance to make my case that the spectacle of Super Tuesday offers.

I understand that early-voting is a well-meaning response to a variety of problems that threaten the health of our democracy:

• Persistently low voter turnout rates in all elections, which make Americans look shamefully apathetic compared to other developed democracies.
• Americans’ growing expectation, in the age of Amazon, Uber and GoPuff, that every life activity should be optimized for their personal convenience.
• The Republican Party’s long-term systematic, anti-democratic and (yes, I’ll go ahead and say it) evil campaign to complicate or deny voting to any Americans whom GOP politicians suspect won’t vote the way they want.

I get that early voting by mail or in person can seem a sensible response to all those lamentable trends. But I still maintain those efforts are wrong-headed. We should go in another direction to counter voter suppression and the other trends that limit turnout. This view is founded on reasons both philosophical and pragmatic.

First, the philosophical (and, yes, I’m prepared for your eye roll):

Voting is not a private, consumer act. It is a public, civic act. It should be done in a communal setting that reminds voters that they should not make their choice solely out of self-interest or convenience, but also with the fates and needs of fellow Americans in mind.

For decades, we have sorely damaged our democracy by couching campaigns and candidates in the habits and language of consumerism. We focus-group and market candidates like laundry detergent, spawning in our politics the same cycles of customer dissatisfaction and lurches toward the Shiny Next Thing or the New, Improved! that Madison Avenue has long sought to foster among consumers. 

Now, our rising generations of voters are mostly digital natives who grew up filling their carts on Amazon et al. with the exact color, shape and size of products they prefer, then opting for convenient home delivery.

We are seeing the impact all this is having on our politics. 

Any product…er, politician…who does not meet some voters’ precise requirements in every particular – who has perhaps in their career sometimes compromised to make the best of a no-longer-understood context – gets rejected, cancelled, savaged on Twitter.

So, no, I do not think making voting an ever-more convenient, do-from-home act is a good idea.

We should demand, frankly, that people get off their asses and put some effort into it – and do it in a way and at places that remind voters that what they do isn’t All About Them. It impacts other people.

Second, the pragmatic:

It’s dumb to let people review the play at intermission. Heed the eternal wisdom of Yogi Berra: It ain’t over ‘til it’s over.

Don’t put people at risk of having their votes effectively voided by late developments the way Klobuchar and Buttigieg voters experienced on Super Tuesday.

Yes, many voters make up their minds early and don’t budge. But the ambivalent voters who decide close elections tend to make up their minds later in the game.

Do we really want those key swing voters making their choice on a whim or a desire to “get it over with” before huge developments in a campaign occur – e.g. a disastrous debate performance, a crisis poorly handled by an incumbent, revelations of scandalous or corrupt behavior? What’s more, do we really want to tell the convinced voter: Ignore all possible evidence that you might want to reconsider?

No, we don’t.

Here’s my alternative proposal, admittedly harder to enact than early voting. Granted, it would require constitutional change. But we live in a nation where at one time more than half its citizens were denied the right to vote, where voters at one time had no direct say over who their senators were. In big, progressive moments, big changes can happen. So let’s do these things:

• Make general elections a three-day event – the first Sunday in November plus the following Monday and Tuesday.
• Make voting in them an enforceable right. Give individual voters the right to sue any time a government entity fails to enable or count their vote – due to a failure to provide adequate sites, equipment or election personnel.
• Require employers to grant every eligible voter in their employ a four-hour period to leave work without penalty so they can vote.
• As a society, work to create a new norm where a young person’s First Vote is a rite of passage that’s celebrated a la First Communion, bar mitzvah, quinceanera or graduation.

Being a First Amendment guy, I’ll resist the temptation to propose a law prohibiting news outlets from reporting exit polls or calling winners before polls close across America. But a three-day voting period ought to restrain the networks’ penchant for premature declaration. Calling any election before late on the third day would be a great way to get egg on your face. By then, everyone would have had a fair, real chance to vote.

But what about primaries? Here’s a modest proposal:

Make them open to all voters and run them the same way on three days in May. If the political parties object, tell them they can pay for their own stupid, private, lead-with-Iowa-and-New Hampshire ballots their own damn selves. Why should taxpayers subsidize the process of two corrupt organizations deciding how they’re going to screw up our democracy this time around?

So, that’s my plan.  Tell me how it would not be better than this mess we’re enduring this year.

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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia.