HUGE VOTER TURN OUT EXPECTED

WE can attest to this one.. I am so glad that I voted by mail absentee ballot but Mike has gone by the early voting places a couple times now and the lines are just too long to make him stay. We figure with 2 million in Florida having already voted in Early voting.. The polls will be busy Tuesday but for the actual election, the number of polls and voting machines should be much better and shouldn't be such a long process. Hopefully anyway. For the Kerry/Bush election however.. Polling places lines were pretty long, which is why after that election.. I started voting by absentee.

Predictions of the highest voter turnout in decades on Tuesday have led the Justice Department to help election officials bracing for problems and spurred a civil rights group to fight for more voting machines in minority polling places.
To prepare against Election Day issues, the Justice Department will deploy more than 800 federal observers and monitors to voting sites in 23 states.
"The Department of Justice will do all it can to help ensure that elections run as smoothly as possible and, equally important, that the American people have confidence in our electoral process," Attorney General Michael Mukasey said in a written statement.
Among the states that DOJ lawyers will observe are Florida, Indiana, North Carolina, Ohio and Virginia, which are all crucial battlegrounds that both candidates want to win.
"On Nov. 4, hundreds of Department of Justice lawyers, monitors and observers will be working throughout the country to help make sure that all Americans who are entitled to vote are able to do so, and that the elections accurately represent the will of the people," Mukasey said.
In Virginia, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) will go to federal court on Monday to demand more voting machines in minority polling places.
The NAACP filed a lawsuit last week alleging the state was unprepared for what is expected to be a huge turnout in Tuesday's presidential election.
A hearing in a Richmond federal court has been set for Monday afternoon. The organization also wants voting hours extended and paper ballots made available in some precincts.
State Republicans plan to oppose the NAACP's request on the grounds that altering voting procedures on the eve of the election would be disruptive and could unfairly disadvantage their candidates.
Record turnout is expected as Obama tries to win 13 electoral votes in a state that has backed Republican presidential candidates since 1968.
Obama would be the nation's first black president if elected.
The NAACP alleged the state failed to provide enough voting machines to handle the crowds, particularly in majority black precincts. The lawsuit in U.S. District Court asked for paper ballots to be provided as one option if lines got too long.
More than 436,000 new voters registered since Jan. 1, a 10 percent increase that pushed voter rolls past 5 million for the first time in Virginia, a state of 7.7 million residents. Much of the increase is the result of the Obama campaign's aggressive registration drive.
At the close of the first fiercely contested presidential race in Virginia in generations, several polls show Obama slightly ahead.
The NAACP had withdrawn its request for a hearing on Thursday after receiving new information from state officials about the placement of Election Day resources. At the time, NAACP officials said a new hearing before the election was unlikely.
But after assessing the updated information, the NAACP concluded preparations were still insufficient and on Friday requested a new hearing.
"We went back and looked at the numbers, and it's still the same old bad news. We're still seeing disparities between black and white precincts," said national NAACP president Ben Jealous.
A spokeswoman for Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine, a Democrat and Obama ally, said the administration was surprised to see the lawsuit renewed. She said state law gives the governor no authority to extend poll hours.
"We feel confident that we'll be prepared," said Delacey Skinner. "I think that voters who are going to the polls on Election Day should go early and be prepared for the line, but we're not anticipating any kind of major problems."
Several Virginia Republicans have filed to intervene in the lawsuit, arguing that last-second changes at selected precincts the NAACP seeks could give the Democrats an unfair advantage.
Cleta Mitchell, attorney for the Republican Party of Virginia, said the GOP particularly opposes a longer voting day and paper ballots at select polling places.
"You just can't have a situation 24 hours before the election where you go to court and start rewriting state law," she said.
Robert D. Holsworth, a professor of government and political science at Virginia Commonwealth University, said some of the steps the NAACP suit wants taken, such as extending the poll closing time from 7 p.m. Tuesday to 9 p.m., might be possible on short notice. But an overnight shuffle of voting machines would be extremely difficult at best, he said.
"The enthusiasm and interest in this election -- that in itself has introduced the potential for chaos and confusion," Holsworth said. "The substantial reallocation of resources at the last minute adds one more element of uncertainty."
In Chicago, election officials expect more than 3 million voters to form unprecedented lines at the polls on Tuesday, despite seeing record numbers of area residents vote early.
Cook County Clerk David Orr says the election is off the charts. Orr noted Friday that some towns had a difficult time handling the lines of people who voted early last month.
Although the extraordinary early turnout -- predicted to be 80 percent -- certainly will make the lines shorter than they otherwise would have been on Election Day, officials say they still expected that issues will arise.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.