Singing the early voting blues

I cast my general election ballot this past Monday, along with the few dozen good people of Florida able to find electronic voting machines that weren’t spitting out the Daily Double results from Hialeah.

The biggest differences I see between me and the Floridians is that I know how to fill out a ballot and I’m reasonably certain Jeb Bush won’t keep my vote from being counted. Plus, I’m rarely troubled by hurricanes, shark attacks or sightings of Katherine Harris’ silhouette against the moon as she takes

her broom out for a spin. (With Congress in recess, she’s avail-

able for Halloween parties.)

Of all the states giving early voting a try, it makes the most sense in Florida. Everybody down there already eats dinner at 3:30, so why not give them an early bird voting special, too?

Pundits keep warning that

early voters will be out of luck if late-breaking events change their candidate preferences. And it’s true. In fact, if a few more states go for early voting, Republicans will have to start pulling September surprises.

The worst thing about voting early by mail: I mistakenly stayed up all night watching for election returns. On the plus side, after making three easy payments I will be the proud owner of a device that promises to cook a perfect pancake every time.

The best fringe benefit of voting early: I no longer have

to pay attention to what Wolf Blitzer’s saying about the campaign on CNN, which allows me to become mesmerized by his lustrous beard.

Voting two weeks before Election Day also gave me time to reflect on how easy we have it in Washington. The biggest problem we faced was picking single-party ballots in the primaries. But check out these voting roadblocks thrown up by political hacks in other states:

That lamest of lame ducks, outgoing Palm Beach County, Fla., elections supervisor Theresa LePore, followed up 2000’s infamous butterfly ballot with a “broken arrow” design this year. It requires absentee voters to select candidates by drawing a line between two halves of, yes, a broken arrow. I guess filling in a bubble next to a candidate’s name didn’t seem avant-garde enough.

In Ohio, the secretary of state recently ordered counties to toss voter registrations on paper lighter than 80-pound card stock. He backed away from the edict after public outcry, but not before thousands of would-be voters had their registrations mulched. “There could be chaos on Election Day, and at the very least there is going to be inconsistencies,” Scott Britton, executive director of the League of Women Voters of Ohio, told the Columbus Dispatch. Which leads me to offer Scott two tips: brush up on your subject-verb agreement rules, and consider how odd it is that you’re a dude running a League of Women Voters chapter.

Meanwhile, back in Florida, Broward County mailed absentee ballots that require 83 cents postage to return. But they went out with envelopes calling for only 60 cents worth of stamps. Why did officials do such an idiotic thing? “We already had the envelopes, so we decided to use them,” a deputy elections supervisor told the Miami Herald. As the Herald’s Dave Barry would say, I’m not making that up.

That last story included a Postal Service official’s assurance that all absentee ballots will be delivered in every state regardless of the postage affixed. So I didn’t even have to put a stamp on my envelope? If only I hadn’t voted so early…