Managing Expectations on Early Voting in Ohio (Updated)

Update: Here's another take from Stella, an organizer with Swing Semester:

Ohioans are very skeptical of voting. In 04 many of their votes were not counted. I know all of these things are designed to help with that. But in their minds it is harder to convince people to vote early. In the end it is still an absentee ballot…

I personally did register before the deadline. And I could have gone and voted early but chose not to. I want to vote on election day. As many other democrats do. While we were at the vp debate watch party last week the Obama campaign was trying to get "die hard" dems to vote early… And they were all saying no… I think that we are all so scared that someone is trying to take our vote away. And with all of the lawsuits that were filed leading up to golden week it created more tension around it. I think in the end we will get them to vote it is just going to be harder to get them to vote early…

--------------------------
The AP is running a story reporting low turnout in Ohio during early voting. The numbers:

As of Monday evening with polling sites still open, projections were that about 4,000 to 5,000 voters in the state's four largest counties would have taken advantage of the policy, which survived multiple court challenges.

Elections officials were surprised by the low turnout.

"With all the hoopla we were anticipating a whole lot more," said Steve Harsman, the elections director in Montgomery County, home to Dayton.

Overall, between 20,000 and 25,000 people were expected to have voted early in person in the four counties, beginning Sept. 30. The four counties include the state's largest urban areas — Cleveland, Cincinnati, Toledo and Dayton — and the focal points of campaign get-out-the-vote efforts.

The Columbus Dispatch had more specific youth numbers to add to this equation:

Of the 9,280 people who had cast absentee ballots in person as of Monday, 3 percent were registered Republicans and 39 percent were Democrats, records show. The rest were unaffiliated.

Of the 2,097 people who also registered to vote before casting an absentee ballot in Franklin County, two-thirds were younger than 34 and nearly 80 percent were from Columbus.

At first blush, that's disappointing news. Not the least because the Obama campaign and independent youth organizers were pushing early voting in the state. I confess that I was a little shocked when I read the story until I talked to Tony Cani, the Political Director of the Young Democrats. Here's what Tony had to say about the situation on the ground:

I really don't think this is that big of a surprise. There is only one voting site per county open - this isn't like early voting in many other states that allows you go to a number of community polling places to cast a ballot.

So, for example, in Franklin County the polling place is in downtown Columbus, an area that has very few residents and has a very high vacancy rate even for businesses. Why would someone schlep down there to vote? It isn't' really easier or more convenient. This takes away the primary argument organizers use to get people to vote early.

I didn't realize that there were so few polling locations. That's certainly a huge obstacle to face in scaling up participation into significant numbers. It seems like those promoting early voting in the state did a poor job at managing expectations here. Though, to be honest, they were in a bit of a Catch-22. They had to talk up the potential of early voting in order to recruit volunteers and drum up interest among potential voters, but there just wasn't enough time to really make it work.