Early voting trickle quickly becoming a torrent

Serenaded by their world famous marching band, almost a thousand students, faculty and administrators marched off the campus of Florida A&M University on Monday. It was not a protest march — at the head of the line was the university’s president, James Ammons.

Forty-five minutes later, they decamped on the lawn of the Leon County Courthouse in Tallahassee. And they voted.

“I feel today is a very important day in history,” said Robert Jones of Orlando, a student at the historically black college. “Hope to elect the first black president of the United States.”

Election Day isn’t until next month, but these Rattlers of FAMU have already cast their ballots in the presidential election. That’s because Florida opens it polling places and allows registered voters to do their civic duty well before Election Day.

Shortly after the FAMU contingent showed up, a second wave of student voters from Florida State University arrived en masse at the courthouse, a turnout that Ion Sancho, Leon County’s supervisor of elections, said was emblematic of overwhelming enthusiasm for early voting this year.

“Early voting is really going to set all-time records here in Leon County,” Sancho said. “I would probably say across the state, they’re going to set records, as well.”

In fact, election experts predict that up to 40 percent of the electorate will vote early in Florida, one of 31 states that let registered voters show up early and vote without restriction. Three other states and the District of Columbia allow voters to cast their ballots in person ahead of time if they have an approved excuse for not being able to make it on Election Day.

Millions of votes in the bank
Thanks to aggressive voter registration efforts by both parties and fueled by younger voters’ enthusiasm for Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., election experts predict that a third of the electorate will already have voted by Nov. 4, up from 15 percent in 2000 and 20 percent in 2004.

The relatively recent phenomenon of early voting — often categorized as “in-person absentee voting,” as opposed to mail-in absentee balloting — presents both opportunities and challenges for candidates and voters. And it means the familiar problems of faulty machines and frustrated voters are played out over weeks instead of hours.

By getting voters to the polls early, the campaigns of Obama and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., can bank millions of votes and focus their energies on other segments of the electorate.

Obama, in particular, has made early voting a cornerstone of his strategy, holding giant “Early Vote for Change” rallies urging Democrats to show up in advance. He has also blanketed Democrats and pastors in minority communities with “vote early” e-mail messages and placed ads in the backgrounds of more than a dozen popular video games.

McCain, by contrast, is relying on his firm supporters to make it to the polls on Nov. 4, Rich Beeson, political director for the Republican National Committee, told The Associated Press. Republicans are focusing their early voting efforts on first-time and swing voters, who might be discouraged by long lines on Election Day.

Partly as a result, election officials report a disproportionally high turnout among registered Democrats in early voting so far, especially in urban centers like Atlanta, Las Vegas and Houston.

Through Monday in Las Vegas, for example, early ballots were cast by 31,875 registered Democrats and 13,371 registered Republicans, the Clark County registrar said, while in Ohio, Democratic voters outnumbered Republicans by 2-to-1 on Monday. Democratic advantages were also reported in Iowa, Nevada, North Carolina and New Mexico.

How those voters actually voted will not be known until Election Day, but Alan Abramowitz, a political science professor at Emory University in Atlanta, said such numbers revealed an “enthusiasm gap,” with “Obama voters more enthusiastic than a lot of McCain supporters.”

But Abramowitz and other experts cautioned against reading too much into those numbers, because an early vote is still just one vote — the same as one cast on Election Day. They noted that Republicans were more likely to vote through the traditional absentee ballot, potentially evening out the imbalance.

An msnbc.com-NBC News special report Alex Johnson is a reporter for msnbc.com. Kristen Dahlgren, Domenico Montanaro, Kerry Sanders and Chuck Todd of NBC News and the following NBC stations and affiliates contributed to this report: KPRC of Houston; KRIS of Corpus Christi, Texas; KRNV of Reno, Nev.; KSDK of St. Louis; KULR of Billings, Mont.; KXAS of Dallas; WAGT of Augusta, Ga.; WBOY of Clarksburg, W.Va.; WCNC of Charlotte, N.C.; WJHG of Panama City, Fla.; WKYC of Cleveland; WMGT of Macon, Ga.; WPTV of West Palm Beach, Fla.; WSAV of Savannah, Ga.; WTHR of Indianapolis; WTLV of Jacksonville, Fla.; WTMJ of Milwaukee; and WTVJ of Miami.

In Florida, for example, the secretary of state’s office reported that Democratic voters outnumbered Republican voters by 2-to-1 on Monday, the first day of early voting. At the same time, it noted that Republicans held a 17 percentage point lead in traditional absentee ballot requests.

“The more important question is whether (early Democratic voting) will translate into higher turnout” than usual among Democrats overall, Abramowitz said.

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