Early voting: a nationwide trend

WASHINGTON — Early voters are casting ballots at a runaway pace in Arizona's biggest county. They've exhausted absentee ballots in some towns in Maine. They're far outpacing 2000 in Florida hot spots.

With 32 states, including Utah, now offering some form of early voting, an AP/Ipsos poll taken last weekend found 11 percent of voters across the United States already had cast ballots, and another 11 percent intended to beat the Election-Day rush as well. Coast to coast, including hotly contested states such as Iowa, Florida, Arizona and Nevada, anecdotal evidence points to increased interest in early voting, a trend that both parties are tracking day by day and county by county as they try to turn it to their advantage.

In Florida's Leon County, for example, the focus of intense litigation during the recount dispute of four years ago, nearly 31,000 people had cast absentee ballots by Tuesday, compared with a little more than 10,000 absentees cast throughout the 2000 race. As well, 8,000 people in the county have taken advantage of in-person early voting, an option that wasn't available four years ago.

In Broward County in Florida, hundreds of people have called to complain that they didn't receive absentee ballots that the county says it mailed more than two weeks ago. The ballots were among 58,000 absentees mailed over a two-day period, and it's unclear how many of them are missing.

In Washington state, another battleground, 60 to 65 percent of the total vote is expected to come in early — in some cases simply because voters want to be left alone.

"Lots of folks have made up their minds, and they figure that if they send in their ballots, the campaigns will stop pestering them," said Snohomish County Auditor Bob Terwilliger.

The big question for President Bush and John Kerry, whose campaigns have worked tirelessly to turn out early voters, was whether they were locking in new supporters or simply getting the same old voters out to the polls earlier than usual.

An ABC News poll released Tuesday found that among people who had already voted, 51 percent said they backed Bush and 47 percent Kerry, a difference that was within the margin of sampling error.

For now, both parties are patting themselves on the back.