Is Early Voting Actually More Of A Time-Drain Than Election Day?

I haven't given too much thought to early voting until I sat back and looked at the calendar for next week. Election day is Tuesday, which will also be the second day of our Food-A-Bago food drive. I always vote and I always go to the polls on Election Day to cast my vote. But after realizing that I would also be spending time up in the camper on Election Day, I thought maybe I should vote early.

After hearing a couple of horror stories about how long the lines were, I finally saw an encouraging post on Facebook from a friend. The friend said that they went to the Oakdale Mall on Monday night just past 6:30, and he was in and out within 20 minutes. I thought to myself, that's not too bad. So Chris and I decided we were going to try and vote early yesterday (Tuesday).

After dinner we got in my car and we drove to the George F. Johnson Memorial Library in Endicott and the line was out the door and halfway down the street. I said, well my friend got in and out of the mall last night pretty quickly, why don't we try there. So we drove to the Oakdale Mall.

When we pulled in the parking lot at the mall we could see the line was out of the door of the former Magic Paintbrush Project and it went down the sidewalk to the former side entrance of Macy's. Chris said she thought that line was shorter than the line over in Endicott, but I really didn't feel like standing outside for an hour. So I suggested we go back to Endicott and hopefully the line there would be much smaller by the time we got there. I was wrong. When we got back there the line was actually longer probably by about 20 people. We just decided to go home.

I'm sure on Election Day the lines won't be that long because all of the polls will be open and people will be going to the polls assigned to their neighborhoods instead of the four early polling sites that are set up in Broome County to handle everybody that are early voting.

One of my co-workers told me today that they went to the mall last night and it took them an hour to get through the line and into vote. They actually arrived at the mall about 15 minutes after Chris and I left.