Before, states seeking to usurp Iowa and New Hampshire as the first-in-the-nation for primary cycles would move their elections forward in the calendar in a game of chicken. Now there’s a simpler, yet more insidious method: Early voting.<\/p>\n
Minnesota voters can, this very day, cast a ballot in the Democratic primary<\/a>. They can even vote for Marianne Williamson, despite her campaign succumbing to dark psychic forces. This is because Minnesota moved its primary up to “Super Tuesday”, the first Monday in March, when the state-by-state free-for-all begins \u2014 and has a whopping 46 days<\/em> of early voting.<\/p>\n Minnesota isn’t the only place this will happen. California makes the jump ahead of Iowa too, but only by a matter of hours. Over there, early voting starts on caucus day. If a California resident lives in a county with a polling station, she could vote at noon PT\/2 CT and be done before Iowans gather in the evening. It’s a little different since California has vote-by-mail, so there probably won’t be a line at the elections office.<\/p>\n But there are two things neither of those states have: Actually counting<\/em> votes in February, and extremely close parallels in general election voting. In fact, from 2000 to 2012<\/a>, Iowa’s and the nation’s presidential party-vote percentages tracked within 1 percentage point <\/em>except the 2008 Republican vote, where the difference was 1.5.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Before, states seeking to usurp Iowa and New Hampshire as the first-in-the-nation for primary cycles would move their elections forward in the calendar in a game of chicken. Now there’s a simpler, yet more insidious method: Early voting. Minnesota voters … Continue reading