Of all the malign political customs supercharged by the 2020-21 pandemic, early voting ranks near the top. Laws expanding the time voters can cast ballots from roughly 12 hours on a single day to periods of up to six weeks have nearly destroyed one of the great traditions of the American republic: Election Day.

For about 100 years, from the early 20th century to the early 21st, Americans voted almost wholly together. The custom offered a splendid example of unity in division. In the early republic and in various ways through the 19th century, laws accommodated early votes for servicemen stationed abroad and citizens living in remote locales. Modern early voting offers something different: convenience.

Beginning in the 1980s, a few states, notably California, began experimenting with the idea that voters didn’t need an excuse—college attendance, prearranged travel, military duty—to cast their ballots before Election Day. A desire for personal expedience would satisfy. The trend toward early voting was part of a larger effort, almost exclusively a Democratic one, to make voting easier. The 1993 Motor Voter Act, for example, required states to offer voter-registration materials to eligible people who apply for or renew their driver’s license or apply for public assistance.

By 2016 about 40% of voters cast their ballots early. A majority did so during the pandemic after public-health authorities warned us that standing in line at the polls endangered our lives, although protesting racism somehow didn’t. About half the electorate voted early in 2022; 60% did so in 2024.

Social critics of various leanings have frequently lamented the fact that Americans don’t do anything as a country anymore. We don’t watch the same TV shows and movies. We don’t read the same books and magazines and newspapers. The Super Bowl is about the only thing that happens with most Americans’ simultaneous awareness and engagement, and even that has turned into an annual quarrel about the halftime show’s propriety.

Now we mostly don’t vote together, either. Gone for a majority is the feeling of standing in line with fellow Americans and registering a sense of who should represent the precinct, district or state.

The idea that casting a ballot requires maximum convenience lent itself over time to the belief that long voting lines are evidence of failure or worse. Christopher Hitchens once alleged in Vanity Fair that John Kerry won Ohio and thus the presidency in 2004. His evidence consisted largely of the fact that people in Gambier, Ohio, encountered unusually long wait times. Stacey Abrams, a candidate for Georgia governor, made herself a minor celebrity by promoting the bogus claim that black Americans meet with more obstacles on the way to the voting booth than do whites. These and 1,000 other attacks on Election Day have made a virtue of voting on any other day.

But the experience of standing in line to vote, far more likely to happen when everyone goes to the polls on the same day, affords a little lesson in civic life. Your neighbors may not pull the lever for your candidate, but you live with them peacefully all the same. Republicans and Democrats regard each other respectfully as they wait in line to deprive each other’s parties of power and receive an “I voted” sticker as a reward. Young Americans in the 2020s could profit from that feeling.

Another reason to vote on Election Day, not before: You can learn a lot about a candidate in the weeks before an election. Recall what happened in Virginia last year. On Oct. 3, 2025, Audrey Fahlberg revealed in National Review that Jay Jones, the Democratic nominee in the race for attorney general, had sent deranged texts about his political adversaries. One opponent, he suggested, deserved “two bullets to the head.”He hoped another’s “children would die.”That such sentiments didn’t befit an attorney general was obvious. But early voting had begun on Sept. 19. Mr. Jones may have won his election anyway, but by fewer than 227,097 votes.

This year offers multiple opportunities for regretted early votes. By a constitutional amendment passed in 2022, Michigan offers early in-person voting no later than nine days before an election—this year, Oct. 24—though some areas offered a wider window. Michiganders who voted early weren’t privy to the weekend’s drama. Democratic nominee Abdul El-Sayed took a pointless shot at Haley Stevens, whom he defeated in the August primary, and Ms. Stevens announced her endorsement of Republican Mike Rogers.

Probably most who’ve already pulled the lever in Michigan wouldn’t find a reason in this drama to wish they had voted otherwise. Mr. El-Sayed’s hatred of Israel, the reason for this spat with Ms. Stevens, is well-known. But more than 700,000 people voted for Ms. Stevens against Mr. El-Sayed, and it isn’t inconceivable that some significant number of them decided over the weekend that they wouldn’t vote for the primary’s winner in the general election. But if they had already voted, too bad.

By far the weightiest revelation in 2026 occurred in Alaska’s Senate race. Eligible voters could cast their first ballots (Alaska uses the complicated ranked-choice system) on Oct. 19. Early voters got their business out of the way. Eight days later, the New York Times published a story detailing a scheme, allegedly carried out by Democrat nominee Mary Peltola and her staff, to recruit a spoiler candidate with the same name as Republican incumbent Dan Sullivan.

A few Democratic pundits have tried to suggest that the Peltola operation, assuming that’s what it was, amounts to a minor bit of chicanery and nothing egregiously culpable. Count me skeptical of that claim, but I’ll await more definitive explanations of Alaska ethics laws. The fact that Ms. Peltola denied having any part in the machination, however, presents political consequences separate from legal ones. The possibility doesn’t seem remote that some appreciable sum of would-be Peltola voters decided they couldn’t in good conscience vote for a candidate who (a) recruited a bogus candidate in a harebrained attempt to deceive voters into voting for the wrong guy, and (b) repeatedly lied about it.

But if such conscientious Alaskans had already cast their ballots for Ms. Peltola between Oct. 19 and Oct. 28, too bad. No do-overs.

By the time the Times story ran, around 41,000 Alaskans had already voted in person, and some 16,000 had returned mail-in ballots. That’s a big number in Alaska, population roughly 740,000. Compare the 2022 Senate race, in which Sen. Lisa Murkowski defeated her nearest competitor in the first round by 2,015 votes and won in the third round by 18,796 votes.

Maybe these days people don’t change their minds or regret their choices. But if everybody excluding officially excused absentee voters had waited to exercise the franchise until Nov. 3, Alaskans would go to the polls with more intelligence than 41,000 of them had in the first week of early voting. Not for the first time, patience receives its reward. Mr. Swaim writes the Journal’s Unruly Republic column.