You have to take your hats off to the early Florida voters:
The second day of early voting was marked with hours-long lines in South Florida as voters — some with books to read, umbrellas to shade themselves from the sun and water bottles — waited for their chance to cast their ballots.
At some polling sites, wait times reached four hours. Lines stretched around buildings.
Hooray for the voters. But this raises the question: why are the lines so long? Why can’t the state of Florida provide enough voting booths and enough voting locations to accommodate the demand. The punditocracy constantly criticizes low American voter turnout, but the fact is that we don’t spend the money we should to make voting easy. There’s a lot of people out there who can’t spare four hours to vote.
I will venture a prediction that this problem will not be unique to Florida. There’s no early voting in Connecticut. Four years ago at least one of the polling places in Groton had lines more than an hour long. Poll workers are well meaning geriatrics who work at a molasses pace. They work from 5:00 AM to 10:00 PM and are paid peanuts. By the end of the day they’re wiped out. Every voter has to pass through the bottleneck created by the fact that there is only one voting list, from which each voter’s name must be scratched. The process could be streamlined if we had more voting machines and there were more check in tables. That could be done by splitting voters alphabetically and routing them to the appropriate check in table. This would mean, of course, attracting more and better poll checkers, which means paying a reasonable amount of money to them.
There will be high turnout this year, even in this deep blue state. There’s no question in my mind that some people will turn away because of long waits.
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