Serenaded by their world famous marching band, almost a thousand students, faculty and administrators marched off the campus of Florida A&M University on Monday. It was not a protest march ? at the head of the line was the university?s president, James Ammons.
Forty-five minutes later, they decamped on the lawn of the Leon County Courthouse in Tallahassee. And they voted.
?I feel today is a very important day in history,? said Robert Jones of Orlando, a student at the historically black college. ?Hope to elect the first black president of the United States.?
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Election Day isn?t until next month, but these Rattlers of FAMU have already cast their ballots in the presidential election. That?s because Florida opens it polling places and allows registered voters to do their civic duty well before Election Day.
Shortly after the FAMU contingent showed up, a second wave of student voters from Florida State University arrived en masse at the courthouse, a turnout that Ion Sancho, Leon County?s supervisor of elections, said was emblematic of overwhelming enthusiasm for early voting this year.
?Early voting is really going to set all-time records here in Leon County,? Sancho said. ?I would probably say across the state, they?re going to set records, as well.?
In fact, election experts predict that up to 40 percent of the electorate will vote early in Florida, one of 31 states that let registered voters show up early and vote without restriction. Three other states and the District of Columbia allow voters to cast their ballots in person ahead of time if they have an approved excuse for not being able to make it on Election Day.
Millions of votes in the bank
Thanks to aggressive voter registration efforts by both parties and fueled by younger voters? enthusiasm for Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., election experts predict that a third of the electorate will already have voted by Nov. 4, up from 15 percent in 2000 and 20 percent in 2004.
The relatively recent phenomenon of early voting ? often categorized as ?in-person absentee voting,? as opposed to mail-in absentee balloting ? presents both opportunities and challenges for candidates and voters. And it means the familiar problems of faulty machines and frustrated voters are played out over weeks instead of hours.
By getting voters to the polls early, the campaigns of Obama and Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., can bank millions of votes and focus their energies on other segments of the electorate.
Obama, in particular, has made early voting a cornerstone of his strategy, holding giant ?Early Vote for Change? rallies urging Democrats to show up in advance. He has also blanketed Democrats and pastors in minority communities with ?vote early? e-mail messages and placed ads in the backgrounds of more than a dozen popular video games.
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