In the 2004 election, at a polling site like the Coral Reef public library branch in the Miami suburb of Palmetto Bay, the early voter tended to be an elderly white Republican male. Four years later, the early voter enduring the long lines that snake around the Coral Reef branch is more apt to be a younger, female, African-American Democrat like Tonia Birgin, 34, a hospital ultrasound technician. "This being Florida, you never know what's going to happen with an election," says Birgin, holding an umbrella to shield her from the midday tropical sun during a two-hour wait this week outside the library. "This one's too important not to make sure my vote gets counted right. So I'm taking my day off today to do this now, not on election day, when it's too late to fix things."
This year Florida Republicans are probably also worrying that it's too late to fix things, and much of that angst stems from early voting. Many of them, in fact, may be wondering what the GOP-controlled legislature was thinking in 2002 when it approved the practice. The answer is that it had to do something in response to the presidential vote recount debacle that embarrassed the state in 2000. And early voting, which allows voters to cast ballots during the two weeks prior to election day at a limited number of polling sites, seemed to benefit the GOP in Florida in the 2004 election (although the state kept no official count that year).
But so far this year, early-voting Democrats are outnumbering Republicans at those sites by more than 20 percentage points, and a WSVN-Suffolk University poll has Barack Obama leading John McCain by a 60% to 40% margin among early voters. What's more, the number of early voters could approach 30% of all of Florida's 11.2 million registered voters by the actual November 4 election day. That massive turnout prompted Florida's GOP Governor, Charlie Crist, to flash his bipartisan bona fides this week and lengthen the weekday early voting by four hours (while letting each county decide whether to lengthen the normal hours this weekend).
