They gotta do this thing differently On the news today it showed people standing in 3 hour long lines to pre-vote. What the christ? Did people forget they can vote on Election Day? I say they have a pre-pre voting period. Give people a chance to avoid the long lines that all this pre-voting causes.
That’s why mine went into the mail box!
It took about 1.5 hours yesterday for me to stand in line and complete my early vote ballot.
I’m going to feel a little silly if the same thing would have taken 10 minutes on election day. 
I spent and hour and fifteen minutes in line for early voting on Saturday. There probably will be longer, insaner lines on Tuesday. Expect a lot of precincts to report their results late because they’ll still have people waiting in line to vote at 9pm. Anyone who is in line at 7pm gets to vote, regardless of how long it takes, so it might be a long night.
Sending this to IMHO, where it can meet the thread where many other Dopers say they pre-voted.
Wow, I voted at the mall in Lombard almost two weeks ago (on a Sunday) and waited less than five minutes. I’ve always heard about these huge waits that people deal with for voting, but I’ve voted in four presidential elections and a couple of other non-presidential elections (primary, 2006, etc.) and have never had to wait more than five minutes.
I voted on Monday at 9:30 am, and had no line at all. 
This is what I don’t understand about what’s going on with this early voter stuff: what is the wait usually like on election day where people are willing to spend hours voting early to…apparently avoid some sort of rush?
When I first voted in a presidential race, we had to wait about 45 minutes because most of us were taking advantage of our state’s same day voter registration law. It wasn’t laziness, but that the town we were voting in had no interest in registering college students in advance on campus, and most of us didn’t have transportation that would have allowed us to register sooner. So, that was a bit of a wait.
In every other election, both presidential and mid-term, that I’ve ever voted in, I’ve waited no more than 5 minutes to vote. Most of the time there’s a line of no more than three people ahead of me at the rolls, and I’ve been able to go to a booth almost immediately. I do not expect it to be any different on Tuesday.
What will Tuesday be like in places that people are waiting a long time to vote early?
Earlier similar thread:
BTW, the lines at my library today are pushing 4 hours long.
Thank goodness for vote by mail.
My co-worker tried to go to the early voting polling station, only to find a three-hour wait. I’m pretty sure it’ll be worse on election day, at least in my neighborhood–in 2004, we waited almost three hours.
Since we’ve noticed that the lines for early voting have been so long, we figured they’d be even worse on the 4th. So we went today and it took about an hour and a half.
If, over a couple of weeks of early voting barely 1/3rd of the voters have voted, and the lines are long in many places, then I think it’s a foregone conclusion that lines in those places will be horrific on Tuesday.
I voted earlier this week. From shutting off the car in the parking lot to starting the car was 12 minutes.
Clearly there are many places in this country which do a crappy job of provisioning enough voting capability to meet demand.
In O4, I went to my local library for early voting. Line was about 3 hours, and I decided to try again later. Later ended up being election day, when I got into my regular voting place in about 10 minutes.
I think in my area (Arkansas) part of the problem is that only certain places are open for early voting. The library served the entire city that, on election day, is served by many different stations. I personally think we should move more towards mail in ballots (we’re overseas now, so we got absentee ballots- much better).
The fallacy here is that, at least in my area, there are vastly more polling places on election day than there are early voting locations, and those polling places will have vastly more voting machines than the early voting locations do. Plus, each polling place is sized to handle its district.
I think it’s not totally out of line to expect a higher voter turnout than previous years, though. While the election officials can probably anticipate and plan for some of this, there’s no real way of knowing how much more until it happens… and I still have the exact same polling place as previous elections, so I have no idea if they’ve done any shuffling to accommodate this. (The room isn’t that big, and I don’t think they could fit more than 5 or 6 voting booths in there – tightly, more like 4 comfortably – if there was a decision to increase capacity.) I’ve never had to wait at my current regular polling place, even arriving after work (which I figure is probably a peak time for people to show up), but I am sort of wondering if there are going to be lines there come Tuesday.
I’m planning to check them out early in the morning to see (it’s across the street from me, so I can probably see a line from my living room window), and will attempt to go when it seems like the lines are pretty short, but if I have to wait in line I will. I’ll probably have nothing else going on that day.
Just curious, how do they prevent voter fraud in vote by mail? If it’s so easy to fraudulently vote in person, wouldn’t it be even easier by mail?
I don’t really understand pre-voting (NY doesn’t offer it).
I’ve never had to wait more than five minutes to vote in a general election. I’m in a suburban district (not urban), but there are two voting districts in my location. Usually, you walk right in. The worst was when there were three people in front of me.
I know there are more polling places on election day, but even then I’ve never seen the lines shown in other states.
Maybe it’s because NY has a pretty good method of confirming voters identity – even without ID. It’s the same method that American Express uses on their Traveler’s checks, and that’s considered good enough to be accepted worldwide as proof of identity. Thus, no issues with identifying voters.
From what I see and hear, it’s clear to me that New York has the best, fastest, and most accurate voting system in the US. And no other states are interested in using it.