Both Democrats and Republicans see early voting – which starts today across North Carolina – as important to their campaigns because it helps mitigate potential Election Day problems and gives them multiple opportunities to get marginal voters to the polls.
Nationwide, the Barack Obama campaign has been working to take advantage of early voting. The campaign has a large Charlotte office and more than 1,000 volunteers manning phone banks and knocking on doors.
“This is exponentially bigger than anything here in many years, probably since Jimmy Carter (in 1976),” said Michael Evans, political director of the Mecklenburg Democratic Party.
The Mecklenburg Board of Elections is bracing for significantly more voters than in the 2004 presidential race, with many voting early. Director of Elections Michael Dickerson has increased the number of early voting sites to 20 from 12 in 2004.
“What's different is that all the campaigns themselves are advertising early voting,” Dickerson said. “That's a big shift from 2004.”
Four years ago, Mecklenburg Democrats ran much of the ground game during the presidential election, in which John Kerry made only a token effort to compete here. This year, the county party has ceded voter registration efforts and get-out-the vote drives to Obama's campaign, whose Charlotte headquarters is a bustling office on Elizabeth Avenue.
Evans said he thinks as many as 50 percent of Obama supporters may vote early.
Mecklenburg Republican Party chairman Lee Teague is taking an active role in early voter outreach because the John McCain campaign has a much smaller presence in Charlotte. The McCain campaign doesn't have as much money, and has had to marshal its resources into what it considers more vulnerable swing states, such as Virginia and Colorado.
“We have to do it all with volunteers,” Teague said. “Getting the vote out isn't complicated. It's just about reminding the voter.”
Teague said his party will use volunteers to place door-hangers on Republican households that list the party's candidates for president and down-ballot races. It also will do a mailing to marginal voters.
For the first time, Teague said, he's trying to place volunteer poll observers at all early voting sites.
The observers, he said, are there to help ensure rules are being followed. For instance, he said, an observer might notice that poll workers aren't asking voters for their address, or are providing their address for them.
In recent days, Republicans nationwide have been concerned about voter-registration drives by Democrats and groups affiliated with them, such as ACORN, whose workers have turned in registration forms with bogus names in several states.
Teague declined to give a goal for early voting.
The Obama campaign also declined to give details about its Charlotte operation, and all media calls are routed to a spokesperson in Raleigh.
Nationwide, the Obama campaign has opened hundreds of offices in swing states, and has tried to assign volunteers and paid staffers to be responsible for areas as small as neighborhoods. Paul Cox, Obama's N.C. spokesperson, said the campaign is aggressively pushing early voting and has volunteers and paid staffers for each precinct.
The Mecklenburg Board of Elections Web site will update daily a list of early voters, which allows campaigns to see who has and hasn't voted. That allows both parties to double their efforts on people who haven't yet voted – especially people with spotty voting history.
This is the second presidential election with early voting in Mecklenburg. Four years ago, about 100,000 voters cast their ballots early, out of 325,000, Dickerson said.
Dickerson said he expects about 400,000 votes to be cast for this election, with 150,000 done early.
John Kerry won Mecklenburg by 52-48 percent in 2004, but lost the state. For Obama to win it, he would likely need to expand that margin in the Charlotte area.
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