Early Voting in Florida

Yesterday was the first day of early voting for the Florida Primary Election. We had to be on site at 6am, as polls opened at 7 for our county. Early voting hours are flexible by county so not all counties follow the same schedule. We just have to be open a set number of hours over a set number of days.

We actually had a short line when we opened. I was astonished as generally speaking in the past, the first day is slow as heck since no one remembers on a Saturday morning that Early Voting has begun. And, we’d changed our location again, so we weren’t sure how many voters had paid attention to the venue change.

The day was slow but not as bad as I’d expected. We had a fairly stead influx of folks and even had a short line several times.

We didn’t have any issues with the equipment and really few folks needing extra paperwork. Only one or two folks who’d requested an absentee ballot but wanted to vote instead, and one person who had to fill out an assistance required form. So us supervisors were especially bored (which is not necessarily a bad thing!).

By the end of the voting day at 3pm, we’d voted 304 at our site.

We’re off today but will be working Monday, Wednesday and Friday. Early voting ends next Saturday, and the actual election is Tuesday August 14th.

The big one in November will be the hard one. We already know every day of early voting will be 12 hours which means about 14 hours for us poll workers. We’re just gearing up for it with this one.