I meant to countdown from Tuesday but getting out the early vote kept me from blogging. Today ends the early vote here in Florida after this historic week forced the Governor to call a state of emergency and increase polling hours, though it may have been better to simply increase the number of polling locations. Early voting may well be the decisive factor in this election come Tuesday, In Florida alone 3.4 million people have early voted, and Democrats have outnumbered Republicans by 200,000 votes.

Early voting has been a clear campaign strategy this year used by Democrats, and non-partisan voter engagement groups to ensure that disenfranchised voters make it to the polls. Voting laws vary from state to state which is why some states are particularly notorious for voter disenfranchisement. Florida is one such state. In Florida your voter registration card needs to match your name on your photo ID. For example the name on my drivers license, passport and birth certificate is Marianne. However, I go by Mariana and have my whole life, so when I registered to vote (in the state of New York), I registered under Mariana.

Now, in the state of Florida technically my vote wouldn’t count because the name on my registration card and my I.D. do not match. Now lets say I live in a county that has few polling places and it’s election day and I’ve waited 3 hours to vote, I get up to the polls and they say I can’t vote because my name doesn’t match. The poll worker has hundreds of people behind me that need to vote as well. They may not let me change my name using a voter registration form (though that is legal up until election day.) Instead, I can cast a provisional ballot that may or may not be counted. Remember the ’04 election when in Ohio provisional ballots were cast but became “invalid.” If this were my experience at the polls I might not feel encouraged by voting in the U.S. And imagine if this is my first time voting as a young person, or recent immigrant, I might never vote again.

Add to this the problem of limited polling hours and limited polling sites. As we’ve seen in Florida, even the early vote has been problematic with polling hours from 10-6 for the first week of early voting, which limited people’s access to the polls because surprise surprise people actually have to work! So the Republican governor increased polling hours but not polling sites. In Broward County people are waiting up to 4 and 5 hours and it isn’t even election day yet. It is sure to be worse on Election Day.

And in Florida voter registration ended in early October, which limits the amount of people who register to vote. As I knocked on door after door people thought that they needed a registration card to vote, they were unaware that they could vote early or absentee, many didn’t know their polling site location. And of course, we should not forget that in many low-income and communities of color there are fewer polling sites. In Gwinnett County, Georgia voters waited in line an average of 10 hours to vote early in this historic election.

Our federal voting laws are arcane. There should be federal mandates that encourage voting. All states should be mandated to allow voter registration up until election day. We should be using paper ballots instead of computerized systems that are confusing to the majority of voters. And of course we should vote on the weekend or at least make voting day an obligatory federal holiday.


Alas, this year the Dems got savvy and said the way to win in key states, swing states was to encourage early voting, and that they did. Through this process they enfranchised millions of voters. In Nevada alone 43% of Democratic early voters were first time and sporadic voters. I’ll say this, after the smoke clears, and the victory parties are over, we will be able to say that this election turned out the highest record of voters in history and showed real Democracy in action.

Join BBN for free to post a comment on this page.
If you already have an account, please login here to post a comment on this page.