Early voting off the charts

by Frank James

As someone who had to wait over an hour to cast an early vote yesterday in Fairfax County, Va,, I can personally attest to the crowds at polling places with six days to go before Election Day officially arrives.

Obviously, it's not just Virginia, an important battle-ground state, that's experiencing the pre-Election Day surge at the polls. Warnings of huge lines on Election Day; excitement especially on the Democratic side, and efforts of both presidential campaigns to lock in their votes early before events can cause voters to shift, have helped to create this year's record early voting in a number of states.

One of the best places to keep track of what's happening in terms of early voting is the website produced by Michael McDonald (the George Mason University professor, not the soulful singer) called United States Election Project.

There he keeps tracks of the early-voting data as it rolls in from the states.

You can see, for instance, with six days to go before Election Day, Florida already is significantly more than 90 percent of its total early voting in 2004.

Meanwhile, states like Georgia, North Carolina and Louisiana are running far ahead of their total early voting numbers from four years ago.

Louisiana and Georgia, for instance, have had more than double the total number of early voters they had four years ago. North Carolina is running almost one and a half times its total voters from 2004.