This is exactly why my wife and I early voted yesterday (for Obama). Although our regular polling place is usually well-run and we’ve never had a problem, we just wanted to be extra sure this year.
Also, at least here in Hamilton County, OH, the Obama campaign has been doing a great job of getting people to the polls. The local campaign has been running a shuttle from the University of Cincinnati to the early voting location every day since early voting opened. You just go up to this booth and they’ll give you a ride to the polling place. My wife and I took advantage of it so we wouldn’t have to find parking downtown. I don’t know if the McCain campaign is similarly organized and energetic.
All of this speculation is interesting, but you’re overlooking one significant element: people registered multiple times by ACORN in pursuit of massive election fraud. If you have to vote 70 or 80 times, you can’t just go to a polling station, get a ballot, and then get back in line. I mean, somebody’s gonna notice, yeah? So you can go to one polling station at most once per day. Then add all the travel time of getting from one polling station to another polling station, especially in sparsely populated areas, or in urban areas with lots of traffic. If you need to vote several dozen times, and if you can realistically vote only four or five times per day, obviously you will need to start voting as early as possible. Obviously. QED.
I realize how unlikely this is as I ask it, but I still think (perhaps foolishly) that it’s an interesting question: is there any chance this could backfire on Obama? And by that, I mean, could enough people vote early for Obama to cause exit polling on Election Day to favor McCain even if the majority of votes cast overall still favored Obama? And could that kind of exit polling cause people later in the day to not bother to vote?
Wrong. You can vote absentee in person. You have to fit some criteria. For example, is it possible that you could be away from your precinct for the entire day?
I think it’s pretty unlikely. There could be some lazy people that will see the polls and maybe not vote, but not enough to make a difference. If this was another election another year and people were only voting for the Democrat because he was just the lesser of two evils, then I could see people not getting up the enthusiasm to go vote if they saw the Democrat was leading in exit polling from early votes. But considering how excited most Obama supporters are about voting for him, I don’t think the polls will make much difference in whether people go out to vote or not.
Even if the polls were showing him leading in a landslide, then people would still go vote so they could say that they were a part of the historic landmark win that Obama had.
I have received three phone calls in the last three days from the Obama campaign asking me to vote early and telling me how to do so. One was a recording of Michelle Obama and the other two calls were live people. I voted yesterday and had to wait about 45 minutes. I needed to go to a community center today where they had a polling station (for reasons other than to vote) and the line was all the way out the door and down the sidewalk. I have no idea how many of these people voted for Obama, obviously, but the stickers on the cars made me think there were quite a few of them (or else McCain people don’t want to put stickers on their cars).
This is in North Carolina. I would say the GOTEV efforts are huge.
