Imagine, for a moment, that you had a rare disease that only allowed you to enjoy the first three-quarters of any movie. You'd go through life never knowing who Luke Skywalker's father was or whether Pee Wee ever found his bike or who ended up with the Glengarry leads or what drove Charles Foster Kane to ruin. You'd think the most shocking thing about "The Sixth Sense" was Bruce Willis' toupee and that Soylent Green seemed like a pretty sensible snack food.

Yet with elections, more Americans are imposing a truncated attention window on themselves by voting early. In the last presidential election, over 30% of all ballots nationwide were cast before election day.

In Wisconsin, early voting began on Monday. In Iowa, voting began on Sept. 27, and in Ohio, voting started on Oct. 2 - before Barack Obama and Mitt Romney even took part in their seminal first presidential debate.

A properly run campaign has a full story arc: The candidate is introduced, comparisons to the opponent are drawn, debates are conducted and the candidates close with their best stuff in the final week. Oftentimes, campaigns will throw out an "October surprise" to jolt voters into voting their way. The late nature of the revelation, which is often an attack on the candidate's opponent, also makes it difficult for the opponent to respond adequately before election day.

But early voters don't want to see the whole movie. Granted, many early voters are the most rigid partisans - some Milwaukee-area Obama supporters actually began camping out in tents on Sunday night to cast their early ballots - and wouldn't necessarily change their minds if any new information emerged late. Campaigns are increasingly geared to getting these hard-core supporters to vote early, so they can spend money and resources later on undecided voters.

But oftentimes, events happen immediately preceding an election that change people's minds. The debate in which Ronald Reagan asked "Are you better off now than you were four years ago?" occurred just days before he went on to surge in the polls and defeat President Jimmy Carter. Imagine being a voter in Iowa or Ohio who cast his or her ballot for Obama before seeing the president tank in the first debate.

The idea behind early voting, of course, was to make it easier to vote. Presumably, if people couldn't make it to the polls on election day, they could simply vote absentee or show up at the city clerk's office to cast a ballot in person.

But a study conducted at the University of Wisconsin-Madison shows that the nationwide move toward early voting may have backfired. The study, conducted by professors David Canon and Donald Moynihan, demonstrated that turnout in counties that allowed early voting was typically about three percentage points lower than normal.

One of the reasons the researchers gave for lower turnout in early voting precincts was that early voting dilutes the civic appeal of "election day" as we know it. The collective experience we all have of going down and casting a ballot is lessened when people have weeks to do it. A lot of people may feel the election will already be over by the time Nov. 6 rolls around. (Ironically, many things that are proven to drive higher turnout, such as greater advertising spending by third parties, are almost uniformly frowned upon by voters.)

Certainly, the elderly, the disabled, the military and Wisconsinites living elsewhere should be able to vote absentee if they can't make it to the polls on election day. But voting early doesn't give citizens the full election story from start to finish. Election day should be as exciting as the Monday night a month ago when the Green Bay Packers got that great win against the Seattle Seahawks.

Or at least I assume they did; I turned off the game with two minutes left. Nothing happened, right?

Christian Schneider is a senior fellow at the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute, a nonpartisan conservative think tank. He writes the Yankee Review blog as part of the Editorial Board's Purple Wisconsin feature. Email christian@wpri.org