If you live in North Carolina, you could vote in the presidential election as early as this weekend.
County elections boards in the Tar Heel State will begin sending mail ballots Friday, allowing some voters to make their choices on everything from their local school board to the next president eight weeks before Election Day.
Republicans have turned their fire on early voting in recent years. Former President Donald Trump, in particular, has repeatedly called for elections to have just one day of voting while making baseless claims about vote-by-mail.
Those claims have been thoroughly debunked. But often lost in the rebuttals of attacks against early voting has been the affirmative case for early voting, including both vote-by-mail and in-person voting before Election Day.
Only three states currently don’t have either no-excuse vote-by-mail or early in-person voting.
So I’m going to make it here. I’m something of an early-voting hipster, having gotten into it in Oregon back in the 1990s — you know, before it went all mainstream. Now it’s everywhere. In fact, only three states currently don’t have either no-excuse vote-by-mail or early in-person voting: Alabama, Mississippi and New Hampshire.
Many Republicans have soured on vote-by-mail due to Trump’s attacks on the legitimacy of the 2020 election, which is unfortunate. But over the last four years, Republican states such as Kentucky and South Carolina have embraced early in-person voting, which offers many of the same advantages and avoids MAGA’s wrath.
Before going further, let’s make one thing very clear: Early voting will not help your favorite candidate win or the other side lose.
We now have years of research that shows that allowing early voting either by mail or in-person most likely has little effect on turnout in big-ticket races like a presidential election. (It may help boost turnout in off-year elections for city council and such, however.) And it doesn’t seem to offer any permanent advantage to either Democrats or Republicans.
So you shouldn’t support early voting because you think it will give your side a tactical boost — and you shouldn’t oppose it because you fear it will help the other side.
Instead, you should support it because early voting is great. Here are just some of the reasons.
In terms of modern conveniences, early voting is up there with the ATM, the drive-thru fast-food restaurant and the 24-hour gym.
Early voting is convenient. Allowing people to cast a ballot on a day other than just one particular Tuesday in November helps people who work long hours, take care of young kids or otherwise have busy lives. In terms of modern conveniences, it’s up there with the ATM, the drive-thru fast-food restaurant and the 24-hour gym.
It helps election workers. Local elections officials are like Santa’s elves: They work all year to ensure that one day goes off smoothly. Spreading out voting over several days or weeks helps lighten that load and gives them a chance to work out problems when they aren’t on a tight deadline.
It safeguards your right to vote. Suppose your voter registration has been inadvertently canceled or doesn’t show your new address. If you go to vote early and there’s a problem, you have plenty of time to fix it. Depending on the state, if there’s a problem when you vote on Election Day, it may be too late to be fixed, or you could be forced to cast a provisional ballot that may not be counted. It reduces long lines on Election Day. With early voting, it’s less likely that unexpectedly high turnout, limited resources or intentional efforts to make voting harder will lead to long lines. And if there is a line during early voting, you can always come back at another time, unlike Election Day voting. Early voting helps improve trust in our election system that has been eroded by politically motivated attacks. It improves confidence in elections. Voters who face problems at the polls tend to have lower confidence in elections. By making voting more convenient and reducing the likelihood of problems on Election Day, early voting helps improve trust in our election system that has been eroded by politically motivated attacks. It prevents the “October surprise.” When more people vote early, it’s harder for some last-minute news — a hostage deal, a decades-old revelation, a letter from the FBI director — to have an outsized influence on the outcome. That also reduces the incentive for campaigns to try desperate last-minute attacks. It makes election interference harder. Attacks on elections infrastructure — whether electronic or through in-person intimidation — are less likely to have an effect when voting is spread out over days or weeks. If all of that isn’t enough for you to consider voting early, here’s a bonus reason: Early votes are tracked by campaigns using publicly available information. So after you cast that early ballot, they’ll stop sending you mailers and text messages about the upcoming election. And what could be better than that?
Ryan Teague Beckwith is a newsletter editor for MS NOW. He has previously worked for such outlets as Time magazine and Bloomberg News. He teaches journalism at Georgetown University’s School of Continuing Studies and is the creator of Your First Byline. 
