Early and absentee voting has begun in Iowa as of Thursday, and thousands of state residents have taken the opportunity to make use of it. Noting that more than half a million Iowans voted early or by absentee ballot in 2008, the presidential campaigns of Barack Obama and Mitt Romney are once again pushing absentee ballot request forms on everyone they can. You might even have seen Obama volunteers at the Memorial Union doing exactly that.

Indeed, campaigns that spend so much time and energy locking in votes weeks before an election demonstrate through their partisan ploy a great deal of electioneering savvy.

Voting early commits people to their decisions before they need to and does not allow them to alter their courses if they deem it necessary. It sets us up for a vast amount of regret should either Obama or Romney — or any candidate for any office — prove himself unable to cope with the pressures that go with holding public office.

Part of the appeal of voting early is its convenience. Rather than voting on  Nov. 6, voters can choose a day that works for them. Here in Story County, for example, you can vote in Nevada at the Auditor’s Office from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and also on the last two Saturdays of the month. Now, not unlike buying groceries, you can vote on whatever day works for you.

The election is not today, nor yesterday, nor was the election on the day early voting began. The election is five weeks from now.

A lot can happen in five weeks.

There will be three presidential debates this month, for example, and one vice presidential debate. Apart from the opportunities to make gaffes as well as important insights and criticism that those debates present, the next five weeks are ample time for a myriad of events to unfold.

Politics is an activity of constant flux. But for the span of time between voting and Election Day, voting early allows voters to stop paying attention to news and revert to their former obliviousness about what is going on in the world.

There is nothing wrong with deciding on Election Day whom to vote for, but the daily use of public opinion polls — as if politics resembles a sporting brawl — stigmatizes undecided voters. When Obama is polling at 49 percent and Romney at 45.3 percent, who wants to be in the 5.7 percent of potential voters who have not yet committed?

Decisions are important and, at some point, deliberation has to end. But let’s not end the deliberation until the appointed time.