Make early voting easy
Thursday's lead editorial.
The voting process should be made as easy as possible. So it’s a disappointment that the state’s elections board didn’t hear the Guilford County Board of Elections’ request this week for lengthening early voting hours on Saturday. It’s also disheartening that a member of Guilford’s board opposed the request.
While the state has allowed some counties to extend early voting, it said Tuesday that it’s too late in the voting process for more changes. The last day of early voting is Saturday.
Granted, there has to come a point for schedule revisions to end. Still, it doesn’t seem like adding voting hours to a day already set for early voting would have been unmanageable. (Florida Gov. Charlie Crist just issued an emergency order to extend hours at his state’s early voting sites to meet high voter turnout.)
Kathryn Lindley, the Republican on Guilford’s three-member elections board, even opposed asking for an extension, saying that adding machines and moving to bigger rooms at some polling places had eased the crowds.
She’s right that changes have improved things. Before they were made, there were reports of three-hour waits and people fainting. But these changes aren’t going to help the tightly scheduled Monday-Friday worker with family duties that include Saturday morning athletics who would have appreciated a weekend polling place open later than 1 p.m.
With that said, Guilford’s elections board staff is to be commended for its efforts to improve the voting process, including an innovation it began just this week. They should help ease conditions during the rest of Guilford’s record-turnout early voting and on Election Day, which is also likely to be a record breaker.
The county has started running information on waiting times at early voting places. See “Early Voting Poll Wait Times” on the Elections Board site at www.co.guilford.nc.us/elections_cms/. There you’ll find which early voting places have the shortest waits and which have the longest.
Don’t have a computer? George Gilbert, Guilford elections director, says the Gateway University Campus (5900 Summit Ave.) and Barber Park (1500 Dan’s Road) sites usually have short waits of about 15 minutes while the Bur-Mil Club (5834 Bur-Mil Club Road) and Friendly Center (3106 Northline Ave.) sites usually are the most crowded.
(The wait at Friendly often was more than an hour when we checked the times Wednesday.)
Gilbert thinks that this year the county has provided voters “their best-ever opportunity to vote,” and that because of early voting, Election Day lines won’t be long. If the state had allowed the county to lengthen early voting hours, we’d be more likely to share his optimism.
Comments (1)
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I just voted yesterday at The Friendly Center early voting site and would like to commend the staff there for being friendly, helpful, educated, and succinct. I arrived 30 minutes early, there was a line almost to Barnes and Noble. Despite the cold weather the crowd was amiable and I struck up a conversation with a mother/daughter couple behind me-the mom being in her 80's and it being the daughter's birthday. Ahead of me were two colledge coeds. The doors were open early so that we would be able to get out of the cold, and when the actual voting starting the lines moved quickly with such an efficient staff. Despite the fact we were voting for different parties, there was a common thread of feeling proud, embracing the democratic process, and voting early was a "very smart thing to do". Kudos again to the men and woman at the early voting site-you made it easy for all of us to do our patriotic duty.
Posted on October 30, 2008 3:38 AM