Drumbeat for early voting pays off for Obama team

[cal04]

http://www.kentucky.com/676/story/579180.html

The drumbeat to vote early is paying dividends for Barack Obama, especially in key battleground states in the South and West where Democrats have cast many more ballots than Republicans - and even in states where registered Republicans outnumber Democrats.

About a third of the American electorate voted before Election Day, largely to avoid long lines at the polls.

"It was so easy. I filled in my ballot with my wife over dinner and then dropped it off on the way to work," said Tony Amadeo, 27, one of almost 1.5 million people who cast early ballots in Colorado, where for the first time a majority of votes in a presidential race will be cast in advance.

More than 29 million people in 30 states have already voted. Democrats submitted 1 million more ballots than Republicans, though registration does not always indicate who voters choose for president.

Record early voting by Democrats in Florida, North Carolina, Iowa, Nevada and Colorado suggests the Obama campaign has rolled up an early advantage over John McCain.

[elocs]

1. Early voting is one of the best solutions to aide an outdated voting system.

We will have nearly twice as many people casting votes in this election as voted in 1960. There is no way the way our voting system is set up to be able to efficiently, accurately, and without voting place troubles to be able to deal with that many votes on a single day. It doesn't matter if we had voting on a Saturday or make voting day a federal holiday--the system cannot handle that many voter on one day. There needs to be early voting spread out over a number of weeks.

Also, we need to be able to register whenever we vote as we do here in Wisconsin. Trouble with provisional ballots? In 2004 nearly 3 million people voted in Wisconsin and we only had about 300 provisional ballots. That's right, just 300. Plus, here in Wisconsin we have a nonpartisan board of elections composed of retired judges and there is no secretary of state involved.