You don’t need a Ph.D. to figure out why Amazon has been so popular with the buying public.

One word: convenience.

Given a choice of getting dressed, getting into the car, and driving to your local store to buy this or that, you can sit in your bath robe, dial up Amazon.com, click on a few links and quickly get back to doing what you want to do for the rest of the day and, before you know it, the purchase is there.

Humans are lazy, don’t want to waste time, and logic dictates that convenience is a strong motivating factor.

Except when it comes to taking the easy way out to vote.

Prior to the voters approving a no-reason absentee voting system, four secretaries of state — three of them Republicans — pleaded with the Republican-controlled Legislature to allow everyone to vote by mail.

And, each time they asked, the GOP Legislature laughed in their face and deep-sixed the proposal.

Instinctively, those Republicans knew that, on a good day, if everyone showed up, there were more Democrats in Michigan than there were Republicans and, therefore, if you made it so easy to vote, more Democrats would do just that and fewer Republicans would get elected. So they chucked convenience-favoring citizens and picked political self-preservation favoring them!

So now everyone is eligible to request an absentee ballot, which is sent in the mail and, with bath robe in hand, people can vote at the kitchen table.

But many will not.

Among the many are mostly Republicans.

So here we go again. The parties are not only divided over policy and philosophy, now they can’t agree on how to vote.

Proof you want?

The Bridge newsletter found that, as of Nov. 4, about 1.9 million voters requested to vote by mail. Of those on that date, 1.2 million had already done so, and, of that total, 61% were Democrats and 33% Republicans. Sixty percent of all the absentee voters were over the age of 65 and that segment of the voting public composes 25% of the total electorate in this state.

Turns out, there is also a gender disagreement, here, too. Fifty-seven percent of the absentee voters are women, thus proving once again they are smarter than men — or so the case could be made.

So why aren’t the majority of voters treating voting like going to Amazon?

Turns out, in part, some of those Republicans don’t trust the mail-in approach, and, if you believe there is rampant fraud in the Michigan voting system, why take a chance that your vote won’t count?

Current Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson has steadfastly debunked the notion that the “fix is in” and asserts that local governments do a bang-up job of running clean, fair, and accurate ballot counting.

Yet the non-believers are just that, and no amount of evidence can divert them from that opinion.

A classic example of how that plays out in real life comes out of Macomb County, where, in 2020, candidate Joe Biden got 56% of the absentee vote while President Donald Trump racked up 68% of the walk-in vote on election day and Trump won that county.

It’s highly unlikely that the difference over using absentee voting will change anytime soon.

It’s just who we are, and, in this case, stubbornness for some trumps convenience.