Blog 5

"Early Voting Suggests 2008 may see record turnout, expert says". Officals in the twenty nine early voting states are reporting record turnouts this year and have counted 2.2 million votes already. Many battleground states like Florida and North Carolina had record turnouts. Turnout in Charlotte, North Carolina was so big that fifteen new voting stations had to be opened up because voters were standing in three hour long lines. The counties of Martin, St. Lucie, and Indian River have had more than six times the amount of early voters than they had at this time in 2004. These are records in early voting, but experts don't expect the record turnout to stop before election day. "This will be the election in which the most people have ever voted in an American election in the history of our country" says Michael McDonald a professer at George Mason University. McDonald also said that there is a very good chance that more than 64% of the registered voters will vote which would be the highest percent since the nineteenth century. I thought that this was an interesting article and I before I read it I hadn't heard of voting before election day and I was suprised that to hear that it could be done. I also wonder what makes someone eligible to vote before election day and if the only criteria is that you are traveling over election day, than I am suprised at how many people travel over November 4th. I also was suprised to hear that states like Georgia and Texas are having record number turnouts because those states are usually huge conservative states and I thought that people wouldn't be as motivated to vote if their state leans so much to one way.