Huge Obama sign chopped and defaced on 123 South to Oakton area, saw it today traveling to a conference past Nutley street.  They scrolled "Socialist" in RED  and chopped it up just enough but not enough to bring it down.  Big Obama sign that was on the issues of HealthCare.  Some odd ducks to do that.  You all may have seen it already. Not sure.  

If voting hours are going to be extended somewhere, they need to be extended everywhere.  And the decision to do it has to be made much further ahead than now: Officers of the election are being paid $150 or something for a loooooong day already, 5 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. or later.  They didn't sign up for a 5 a.m. to 11 p.m. job.  Even though part-day shifts are permitted for some officers of the election, the precinct chief has to work the whole day.

So if something like this is going to be done, the decision to do it has to be done way ahead of time, and in a much transparent and democratic way than by edict of the governor.

If the problem is that there are not enough voting stations at particular precincts, that's the fault of the boards of elections in those areas.  Selectively holding the polls open later is not the answer.  

I think this is sheer demagoguery from Wilder. A serious appeal for longer hours needed to be made back in July or August, when there's time to sign up extra election workers.

In Florida, Gov. Crist (R) has already extended voting hours under emergency powers he possesses.  I see no demagoguery in what Charlie Crist did, and I don't see any in what Doug Wilder's proposing.  

Charlie Crist is extending voting hours for early voting, not for election day.  It's completely different than making an arbitrary decision to allow some polling places to have longer hours on election day than others (which, I guarantee would lead to lawsuits against the state).  

Early voting can be expanded without charges of unfairness because there is always the option of in-person voting on election day.  Election day is it.  Campaigns plan GOTV and localities commit resources to staffing the polls on the basis of the announced, statewide laws for voting hours.

To make a change now, when most localities have already trained their poll workers, would create a big disruption. To make the change for some areas and not others would be blatantly illegal.

Yes, voter turnout will be heavy. Projections are about 80%, as opposed to 75% in the last presidential election. And registrations are up by about 10%. Which means that a precinct that saw 5,000 voters in 2004 may see about 5,900 voters this time (although absentee voting is also way up, which would reduce that number. To deal with this increase of 18%, the State Board of Elections has increased the number of voting machines and election officials by a third (more in some places). There may be lines, but I don't think the extra hours are needed to cope with this.

Speaking as an officer of election, those three extra hours you're talking about would be deadly. It's already a stressful job, and we're at the polls from 5 am to well after 7 pm as it is. If you tell me I have be there until 10 pm (11 or 12, in reality, since totals need to be processed and machines closed down), I might never do it again. This decision should not be taken lightly, and I believe the SBE has already done what it needs to do to cope.

Virginia could ease the pressure on polling places by allowing anyone to vote absentee who wishes to -- without having an "excuse".

can that be done now or is it too late?

Liberalizing absentee voting would require the General Assembly to approve the change.

I've been in favor of such a change forever, to bring Virginia into line with most other states.  But it's changing the law governing elections, not something that can be done by executive fiat.  

And even if it could be, it would be wrong at this late date (even aside from the fact that absentee ballots applications had to be into registrars' offices by end of business yesterday, Tuesday 28th).

A level playing field means that everyone knows what the rules are going to be going into an election cycle; they can't and shouldn't be changed within 90 days, just as states should not be permitted to purge voter rolls within that period.

This can be corrected by the incoming Congress.  They can mandate that for all Federal elections, that some form of no-fault early voting be allowed.  Or they can mandate some minimal level, and states can expand upon this if they wish.

At the same time they can fix that law that allows the voter purges just before an election.

I would also like instant-runoff-voting while we are at it, but that would be a tougher sell..

HB 2901 Absentee voting, in-person; qualified voters may vote at sites provided in locality.
Patrons-- Spruill, Armstrong, Jones, D.C., Moran and Ward
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Summary as introduced:
Early voting.  Provides that any registered voter qualified to vote in the election may vote in person from 17 to three days before the election at specified times and at the sites provided in the locality. The provisions for absentee voting remain in effect except that the provisions for in-person absentee voting are superseded by the early voting process during the early voting period. The bill takes effect January 1, 2008.

01/19/07  House: Passed by indefinitely in Privileges and Elections by voice vote

Spewed my hot cocoa just thinking about it...

has a nice ring to it though.

I think we need longer voting hours, and while I think we need longer hours this year especially, it might be too late to deal with that.

But, 7pm isn't late enough, particularly here in NoVa.  It should be 8pm, so commuters have more time.

Any one in line at 7:00 pm can vote.  It will be a long day when the line is an hour long at 7:00 pm.

If they don't think they will need to and then get caught in traffic, they are screwed.  It happened in a recent election, where there was crappy weather and many many people didn't make it to the polls due to a sudden ice storm in NoVA.

Getting from DC back to northern VA by 7pm is not always easy in the best cases.

Dump the whole absentee voting thing and make it early voting.  Or, keep the polls open later.

With the combo of DRE (computer) and scanner, they will be able to move a lot of people through quickly.  On each scanner they should have 4-6 people per minute, which is really fast.  With 2 per precinct plus X number of DREs, most precincts should be able to move 10-15 voters per minute.

Prince William is another matter - I don't think they're using optical scanners at all, and from what I've heard from Voter Protect guys, they don't seem to have done a good job of scaling up their regular machines at a lot of the newer and high-growth precincts.

I know that in Fairfax, the precincts will have 1-2 more books than last year.  If memory serves me, formerly, each book had about 1,500 voters in it, so a 3-book precinct would be about 4,500.  But, a lot of the bottleneck was at checkin, not necessarily at the machines.  Now, a precinct with 4,500 people will have 4-5 books, so you'll have much shorter lines at check-in.  At my precincts, they've expanded books by about 25-40%, so they should actually be ahead of per-voter processing both at check-in and at voting machine.

We arrive at the polls at 5:00 AM and leave a late as 10:00 PM.  That is one LOOOOONG day.  If the polls were to close at, say, 10:00 PM, workers wouldn't be able to leave until midnight.  Most poll workers are senior citizens.  How would this scenario be handled?  Split shifts?  There is a problem getting enough workers as it is.

Civic duty or not, I would no longer be a poll worker.

I posted this without thinking about that issue, but it's a crucial one no doubt.  Of course, so is making sure that every person who wants to vote gets a chance to vote.  How to weigh these various concerns is the question...

Voting times are set out in the Code of Virginia.  Legislative action is required to change it.  The only provision for changing an election is to postpone it in a state of emergency.  So sorry the former Governor, an attorney, didn't know that . . .

§ 24.2-603. Hours polls to be open; closing the polls.

At all elections, the polls shall be open at each polling place at 6:00 a.m. on the day of the election and closed at 7:00 p.m. on the same day except as provided for central absentee voter precincts pursuant to subsection F of § 24.2-712.

At 6:45 p.m. an officer of election shall announce that the polls will close in fifteen minutes. The officers of election shall list the names of all qualified voters in line before the polling place at 7:00 p.m. and permit those voters and no others to vote after 7:00 p.m.

(Code 1950, §§ 24-182, 24-184; 1950, p. 462; 1958, c. 160; 1962, c. 536; 1966, c. 116; 1970, c. 462, §§ 24.1-98, 24.1-99; 1981, c. 425; 1993, c. 641; 2008, c. 423.)