...Election Day still appears on the calendar. But its importance is steadily diminishing. Consider three recent news items:

* The Chronicle of Higher Education and Harvard's Institute of Politics released a study showing that 33 percent of US colleges and universities are not complying with a federal law that requires them to provide students with voter-registration forms. Those schools, scolded David King, the institute's director of research, "are . . . clearly failing their students, the communities in which they live, and . . . the next generation of political voters."

* The Washington Post reported in a front-page story that "many people with advanced dementia appear to be voting in elections -- including through absentee ballot." Studies in Pennsylvania and Rhode Island have shown that patients at dementia clinics are actually more likely to vote than the general public.

* The Associated Press reported that 32 states now permit some form of early voting, either by making mail-in absentee ballots available to any voter or by opening polling stations weeks before Election Day, or both. The story quoted Meredith Imwalle of the National Association of Secretaries of State: "We're in 2004, and both parents are working. Kids are in school, with 500 activities a week. People's lives are such that they're not able to come to a screeching halt and march down to their local elementary school on Election Day."

What links these stories is the fetishization of voting -- the contemporary belief that nothing is more important to our civic health than increasing voter turnout...

These drawbacks might be a price worth paying if absentee and early voting really did encourage more citizens to vote. It doesn't. According to Curtis Gans, director of the Committee for the Study of the American Electorate, the data are "unequivocal" in showing that easy absentee voting doesn't boost turnout. It isn't lack of time that keeps so many Americans from voting. It's lack of interest. Citizens who care about elections will always find a way to vote. Citizens who don't care aren't likely to vote no matter how much they are coaxed and begged to do so. It's time to stop the coaxing and begging, and to restore the significance that Election Day used to have.