I voted...

[sleigh]

Ohio allows early voting, so to avoid the rush on Election Day, I went down to the BoE this morning and voted.

There was still a rush. The room was full of voting booths, and there were six lines for registration, yet I had to stand in line to fill out the paperwork and get my ballot. The BoE employee there -- a very helpful and enthusiastic young woman -- told me that it had been like this since early voting opened, and that they'd had 800 or so people vote yesterday, and it looked like today would be the same.

It would seem that early voting is rather popular.

My random exit poll (with a sampling error of A Lot) of the six people in the elevator with me as I left would indicate that the vast majority of the early voters are for Obama. All six of the other people in the elevator said that they'd voted for Obama (as I did also). One of them, as we were walking down the sidewalk to our cars, said emphatically that "I really, really want the country I love back. Bush and his people stole it from us over the last eight years..."

I walked out into cool sunshine. It felt like a good day.

Comments

[mrbankies.livejournal.com]

Cool. I hope your informal exit poll bears fruit in 12 days. Wish New York offered early voting, but it seems I'm destined to fight the lines, and it'll be extra bad due to the switch over in voting process. No more levers, as I think we're using some for of paper ballot since there wasn't enough time to get electronic voting in place.

[doclnghair.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I REALLY needed to hear that positive word!

[chamois-shimi.livejournal.com]

I am SO GLAD that all voting here is done by mail. So glad! More states should do it. ;D

[jdonat.livejournal.com]

Early voting in Illinois has been very heavy. One of michelle's friends is an election judge and they have been told by the county to encourage early voting as turnout here in Illinois is expected to be very very heavy.

The better news is that early voting in Indiana has been very popular -especially in heavily Democratic areas. The GOP is doing everything it can to supress it, but has been slapped down by the Indiana Supreme Court.

[smofbabe.livejournal.com]

I mailed off my ballot through the Overseas Vote Foundation's arrangement with FedEx (free from Australia!) and, what are the odds, the woman ahead of me in line at the FedEx location was also an American sending her ballot! Also an Obama supporter, too.

[almsthvn.livejournal.com]

I've gotten so paranoid about Ohio elections. I have high fears of them screwing with the early ballots - losing them 'accidentally' or otherwise.

Isn't that sad.

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

It's an understandable worry. OTOH, there is a paper trail. They'd have to throw away not only the ballots but the separate forms that say we were given an early ballot. It'd take a lot of cooperation among election officials to toss ballots without someone realizing that the vote count doesn't equal the number of people who voted, but...

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

It seems the Obama camp is heavily pushing early voting where it's legal. The McCain side, not so much.

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

Indiana going blue would be... really surprising.

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

Hearing everyone say they were voting for Obama made my day, as well. :-)

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

But... does voting by mail leave a paper trail?

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

Good luck with the lines -- but stay in 'em!

Blue Indiana

[jdonat.livejournal.com]

A number of polls are showing Obama +10 over McCain. The aggregate shows Indiana within the MoE on all the other ones. I think that economics are trumping everything else, especially around the Turnpike corridor from Elkhart back to the Illinois border. This part of Indiana is the heavy industry part, and it's hurting real bad.

Look, PA and OH going blue would have been a BIG event not too many weeks ago, and now it looks like PA is +12 and OH is +10 for Obama.

Re: Blue Indiana

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

I expected Obama to take PA, since Kerry did also. Ohio's another matter -- the north of the state is blue, but the south (where I am) is heavily red. It's still a toss-up here, but Ohio has voted blue before in the Clinton years. The polls are looking marginally good.

[chamois-shimi.livejournal.com]

That depends on what you mean precisely - once they've verified a signature on the outer envelope of the ballot, they can no longer attach a particular ballot to a particular person, no.

However, they do *have* the paper ballot, physically, in hand, and can count and re-count it as many times as they need to.

[jonhansen.livejournal.com]

Very nice. Lisa has tried to vote early no less than seven times, and each time the line is longer and longer and longer. This morning the nice polling man told her the wait was approximately 3 to 4 hours. Ah, Georgia.

[sleigh.livejournal.com]

Wow, that doesn't bode well for election day...

[jonhansen.livejournal.com]

Well, there's one early voting place in the county (there's supposed to be two, but that seems to be a lie; might not have been enough poll workers).

It's a county with 300,000 registered voters, more or less. They've been doing early voting since September 13?. As of today (Friday), 48,000 of them have already voted.

It'll be a bit better next week, since they'll go from one early voting place to six (supposedly). And when voting gets going, there are regular 175 polling places overall.