Race to Washington

Palm Beach all over again

I’ve had a few days to consider lessons from a visit to the Palm Beach centre of election in Florida.

I went down to find out whether there’s any chance of a repeat of the 2000 election fiasco, when Palm Beach was the epicentre of a world-changing recount.

But there was another story waiting for me.

There was a queue of early voters wrapped around the Elections Office all the way to the Exxon station. And the polling station wasn’t due to open for another half and hour.

The election official we came to interview told me the average wait for a voter was two and a half hours.
 
Florida allows people to cast ballots early, positively encourages it. In Palm Beach, they expect a record number, as many as 100,000 people, to vote early. With almost a week to go, early voting in 2008 has already outstripped the overall total for 2004.

This appears to be good news for Obama.

(and this YouTube video from Gallup might tell you why)

By my rough estimate, more than half of the people in that line were African-American, including a rowdy but good natured group of kids from the Palm Beach Lakes High School.  Their teacher kept them amused as they waited by holding a curbside quiz on the history of the American presidency. With each correct answer she handed out a bag of sweets.

Further up in the line was a woman with a small child called Sean and a t-shirt that read ‘Got Hope’ with the words Barack Obama beneath it. This was her third try at early voting.

There were young men in military uniforms, immigrants, retirees, Hispanics, chino clad white men: the melting pot in single file.

In the ten or so random interviews I did in that line, just one man declared his intent to vote for John McCain. Everyone else repeated a variation of the same two words: change and Obama.

This is an unscientific survey (in a lower income part of Palm Beach) but it tells you the potential for Obama that comes with a huge early turnout.

By the way, as to my original question, could there be chaos on election day in Palm Beach. The answer is ‘hell yes!’

First, there is a new voting system which had a serious glitch in a recent local election.

And high turnout is also part of the the problem. The official forecast is that 80-90% of eligible voters will turn out in Palm Beach. That is 700,000 people. And even when you take into account early and absentee ballots, about 500,000 people are expected to show up on election day.

That means, for the anoraks among you, no early exit polls from Florida. Polling stations will likely stay open well beyond the official closing time of 7 pm (midnight Irish time) and that means we probably won’t hear a result from Florida until the early hours of Wednesday morning.

It also means plenty of potential mischief for the thousands of lawyers who are due in Palm Beach on election night to monitor the results.

For more on the US election go to RTE.ie/uselection
 

Posted at 12:16PM Oct 31, 2008