Two issues seem very relevant to me as another hyperbolically intense and polarized electoral cycle approaches, both, to some extent, being currently considered by the United States’ utterly politicized Supreme Court (Michael Watson, Mississippi Secretary of State, Petitioner v. Republican National Committee, et al., Docket Number: No. 24-1260, U.S. Supreme Court), much more a politburo than an impartial arbiter of legal disputes.  They involve the electoral cycle and mail-in-ballots.

Election days are by necessity arbitrary.  Electoral periods, what we have today, involve a temporal range culminating in an end date and they are also arbitrary, but more complex.  To me, an “informed” electorate may be the most essential factor for a functional democracy, excluding aspects related to electoral corruption (which has always been present).  An informed electorate requires that the voters have access to all relevant information before making their decisions.  That argues against a temporal range with early voting, especially when the temporal range is broad because political parties and advocacy groups are desperate to have votes frozen in time at the earliest possible moment so that voters do not continue to receive information that might impact their vote in manners adverse to the interests of such groups although, of course, such impact would not always impact them negatively.  To me, therefore, early voting is more democratically counterproductive than is receipt of mail-in-ballots postmarked on the final “end date” but received a reasonably short period thereafter.

Mail-in-ballots involve a different, albeit related issue, and that is that they facilitate electoral corruption, and not limited to the casting of ballots by illegible voters or the casting of ballots by a voter in multiple jurisdictions.  They facilitate the creation of a market for purchased votes, for example, by facilitating the purchase of a signed ballot, filled in or vacant, from a voter who either needs the cash or sees voting as a profit making opportunity, a world-wide phenomenon probably as old as the first election, and not limited to mail-in-ballots, but certainly facilitated by them.  On the other hand, there is certainly justification for use of mail-in-ballots where nearby polling stations are not available, for example, where voters reside abroad, or for use by voters whose mobility is restricted because they are incapacitated.

The foregoing issues merit serious reflection and better solutions than those available today (or as proposed in the hyperbolically denominated “Save Act”[1]), understanding that neither electoral ignorance nor electoral corruption are likely to ever be eliminated but that they can certainly be minimized.  Unfortunately, such solutions would require non-politicized arbiters without personal interests in the results and that mechanism is non-existent in the good old USA.  Or actually, anywhere else.  Less disinterested arbiters than the United States’ major political parties, the Democrats and the GOP, however, are difficult to imagine.  Consider for example their oscillating positions on the gerrymandering issue.  And they are the ones on whom, along with the nine political appointees to the Supreme Court, we are left to rely.
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© Guillermo Calvo Mahé; Manizales, 2026; all rights reserved.  Please feel free to share with appropriate attribution.

Guillermo (“Bill”) Calvo Mahé (a sometime poet and aspiring empirical philosopher) is a writer, political commentator and academic currently residing in the Republic of Colombia (although he has primarily lived in the United States of America of which he is also a citizen). Until 2017 he chaired the political science, government and international relations programs at the Universidad Autónoma de Manizales. Previously, he chaired the social studies and foreign language departments at the Eastern Military Academy in Huntington, New York. He is currently the publisher of the Inannite Review available at Substack.com; an intermittent commentator on radio and television; and, an occasional contributor to diverse periodicals and publications. He has academic degrees in political science (BA, The Citadel, the Military College of South Carolina), law (JD, St. John’s University, School of Law), international legal studies (LL.M, the Graduate Division of the New York University School of Law) and translation and linguistic studies (GCTS, the University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies). However, he is also fascinated by mythology, religion, physics, astronomy and mathematics, especially with matters related to quanta, cosmology and cosmogony. He can be contacted at guillermo.calvo.mahe@gmail.com and much of his writing is available through his blog at https://guillermocalvo.com/.

[1] The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act (H.R. 8281/H.R. 22).