Early voting makes us late voters happy
If there was one major difference in voting here than in St. Louis, it was the lack of crazy long lines. This is most certainly due to Colorado’s policy of providing multiple sites and multiple days for early voting. Missouri, however, continues to only allow mail-in and regular poll voting. When we voted in Missouri in the last presidential election, Sam and I waited well over an hour to cast our votes. There wasn’t any particular problem with the machines, ballots or poll workers, but the sheer number of voters crammed into one location for one day made it long and annoying.
In Colorado, there’s a two week period where you can vote prior to the election. There tend to be 4-10 voting sites per county and you can vote at any of the locations within your county, between the hours of 8am and 5:30pm (hours differ slightly by county). Despite urging from multiple friends to take advantage of this, I had much more time available on voting day itself, and held off voting until this morning. And it paid off! 30% or so of registered Colorado voters had voted early, (67% in one county) making my trip to the booth smooth and simple. I took longer to fill out the ballot with its dozen amendments than I did waiting in line. Across the county, poll workers were complaining of being bored, because there weren’t that many voters trickling in today. (Turnout overall is still expected to be high, just distributed through early, mail-in and traditional voting). Compare this to reports from St. Louis:
“Problems persist at Velda City city hall tonight, where more than 200 people still waited to cast a ballot as night fell and the closing of polls neared. The wait: still about 5 hours.” – STLtoday.com
Even the exact polling place I used to vote at had long lines. A friend emailed me:
“We waited four hours in line to vote this morning! We arrived just before 6:00. The polling place didn’t actually open until 6:30. And then there were not enough election workers in place to move things along.”
I’m not so much feeling voter outrage as thinking that I’ve observed an easy solution to this. Missouri (and the rest of the non-early-voting country) would be much happier with early voting. It makes it easier on poll workers, on voters who can’t get time off on voting day easily, on people with unusual work schedules, on voters who like to vote early, and even people like me who stubbornly insist on voting the old-fashioned day-of way. Demand more voting days, MO.
2 comments Tuesday 04 Nov 2008 | m. | Other
it’s awesome that there has been this “problem” of long lines all over… people taking a greater interest in public issues is always a good thing
They just found out that one of the reasons for the slow voting in Velda City was a food table used by poll workers that the poll supervisors declined to move to another room:
‘Jack Cardetti, spokesman for the Missouri Democratic Party, said the situation in Velda City offers “an example of why we need early voting in Missouri. It’s unreasonable to ask voters to stand in line for hours.”’
Early voting, nationwide is the way to go.