Early voting trickle quickly becoming a torrent

‘Such a historic election’
Early voting was adopted in many states after the disputed 2000 election, and this year it has put down deep roots. Across the country, election officials report record-shattering early turnout.

“There is so much passion coming from both sides. This is such a historic election in so many different ways,” said Lynn Bailey, director of the Board of Elections in Richmond County, Ga.

Nearly 700,000 Georgians and 500,000 North Carolinians had already voted by Wednesday, with nearly two weeks to go, while Bruce Sherbet, elections administrator in Dallas County, Texas, predicted that early voting numbers from 2008 would swamp those of 2004.

“If it sustains and continues through the 12-day period like this, there’s not going to be anything close to compare it to,” he said.

Meanwhile, in Houston and the rest of Harris County, Texas, the turnout on Monday, the first day of early voting, was 83 percent higher that it was on the same day four years ago.

“There are many factors — from the first woman potential vice president to an African-American running for president,” Harris County Clerk Beverly B. Kaufman said. “No one will ever say that 2008 in Houston was ho hum.”

But while welcoming the show of civic interest, some election experts cautioned that early voting has potential downsides.

The problem for the candidates is that banking millions of votes in advance means those votes are locked in and cannot be swayed. That puts pressure on the campaigns to burn through their cash weeks ahead of the election, before too many votes are set in stone.

“You can’t hold your big guns right to the end,” said Paul Gronke, director of the Early Voting Information Center at Reed College in Portland, Ore. “When up to 25 or 30 percent of the electorate has already cast a ballot, it might not be wise to wait until the last minute” to try a game-changing play.

Voting early also means a voter is stuck with his or her decision, no matter what happens in the final days of the campaign.

“Once you cast that vote, there’s still two weeks or a month to go, and what happens if something eventful happens with a campaign or a candidate during that period and you change your mind?” said Craig Wilson, a political science professor at the University of Montana.

Still a few bugs in the system
Early balloting also means more opportunities for something to go wrong. In many states, long lines have led to long waits — two hours in parts of Florida, 90 minutes in Houston and Chicago and an hour in Charlotte, N.C.

And familiar problems of the past keep springing up:

• In Florida — scene of the dispute that garbled the 2000 election — ballot-reading machines failed in Duval County, while in Miami-Dade and Broward counties, Democratic Rep. Kendrick Meek is threatening to file a lawsuit because some polling places have too few voter machines to handle the crowds.

Meek, who said excessive waits could disenfranchise voters, compared Monday — the first day of early voting — to a churning hurricane. “Let’s consider this a Category 1 today,” he said. “By November 4, it will be a Category 5, if not 6.”

• In Ohio, voters turned up at polling places in Wayne County this month only to find no ballots. Patty Johns, director of the county’s elections board, said they would be sent ballots in the mail.
• In Indiana, a judge is weighing arguments in a motion to halt early voting and throw out the votes in heavily Democratic Gary, Hammond and East Chicago, where Republicans allege a procedural violation in the elections board’s vote to approve the voting locations.
• In West Virginia, some Democratic voters in Putnam and Jackson counties complained that touch-screen machines changed their votes to Republican.
• In Texas, voting machines failed in several locations this week. Voters in the Acres Homes area of Houston were told to go home and come back later when the machines were fixed. Meanwhile, the computer mainframe crashed under the weight of the heavy turnout in Corpus Christi and surrounding Nueces County, election officials said.

“Here we are, the first day, again not being prepared,” said Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee, D-Texas.

Election officials in all of the troubled jurisdictions chalked up the difficulties to first-day glitches. They promised that the problems would quickly be fixed and urged voters not to be discouraged.

West Virginia Secretary of State Betty Ireland said the state’s touch screens were overly sensitive and needed to be recalibrated from time to time. She said voters concerned about their machines should ask poll workers to move them to another machine.

Lester Sola, elections supervisor in Miami-Dade County, Fla., said officials “recognize that there is a concern, and we will be looking to address those concerns either with more personnel, more goodwill ambassadors and offering our voters the opportunity to cast an absentee ballot.”

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