Really, it’s not. 

Dear Reader, you may think by putting it off and procrastinating, by leaving it to the last minute, you have missed the chance to cast your vote in the 2026 elections.

Well, you have not. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Due to a little-known loophole in the law, you are technically allowed to cast your vote TODAY—Tuesday, November 3, 2026, Election Day. Any time until the polls close at 8:00 p.m.

Yes, it’s true. You can still vote on Election Day. So if you by any chance have not voted yet, drop anything you’re doing and rush down to the polls. Provided you are an American citizen over the legal voting age of eighteen. Bring your photo ID with you. 

I’m going to do it today. 

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Actually, I’ve always voted on Election Day, except a couple of times when I was actually out of the country on Election Day. Call me old-fashioned. 

“Why don’t you vote early, O New Favorite Writer?” 

Because there is a special day established for voting, and it’s Election Day. Elections held in November are always on the first Tuesday after the first Monday of the month—never before the 2nd, never after the 8th. Other elections are held in other months, but each of them has a particularly designated Election Day.

Election Day is a kind of tribal rite in American-style democracy—a time for everybody to gather together and exercise their enormous power, the power of the ballot, all at once. Mostly, of course, cancelling each other out. But still. 

In the old days, before the so-called Australian ballot system was introduced in the 1890s, your vote was public. You marched up to the clerk and stated your preference. Your vote was duly recorded and announced orally, for the benefit of all the political hacks hanging around the polls keeping score. So everybody knew how everybody else voted. That could make it a little uncomfortable for you afterwards, depending on which neighborhood you lived in and how you voted. 

Now, we get to vote in private and see the results announced on the evening news. Or the next morning. Or the next week or month, depending on the jurisdiction and the vagaries of politics. 

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Just because I prefer to vote on the actual election Day itself doesn’t mean you are obligated to. In recent years there has been a trend for casting your ballot early. This was acelerated by the recent pandemic and also by laws in various jurisdictions making early voting easier. The candidates and parties like this, because it allows them to get a running start, so to speak, and try to lock in the votes of their base for the candidate of their choice. A lot of individual voters like it, too, but I don’t know why. You’d have to ask them.

Even though I prefer to wait until the big day, I know it would be a big mistake to rule out early voting altogether—especially voting of the absentee variety. If there had not been absentee voting in 1864, General McClellan would probably have ousted President Lincoln, negotiated a weak peace—and the whole Civil War to that point, hundreds of thousands of lives and millions of dollars of property damage, would have been pointless. Lincoln was put over the top by the near-unanimous vote of the boys in Union blue, many of whom voted in the field, responding to special canvassers sent from their home states. 

We ought not to disenfrachise those for whom voting in person on Election Day is impractical.

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Some people feel voting is pointless, because what does one vote amount to among many thousands of votes? I can see that line of reasoning, but I vote anyway—only because it’s the one time the politicoes ask my opinion on what disasters they are about to unleash and who ought to have the honor of unleashing them. I always want my opinion to have been registered. 

I breathe a sigh of relief on Election Day, because it means we will now be spared political commercials, for a week or two at least, until the next round begins. 

The advertising is one of the most dispiriting things about our system for the average, patriotic citizen. We are forced to endure months of bombast in which every candidate of every party is blackguarded as the veriest scoundrel who ever came down the pike. 

Give me a break. Please. They can’t all be as bad as they all say they are. 

Or can they?

Think on it, neighbor.

And vote, if you haven’t done so yet.

Blessings,

Larry F. Sommers

Your New Favorite Writer