Voting in shorts? That's what the weather man on CBS says we will be doing tomorrow. Beautiful, unseasonably warm weather is predicted for what looks like the entire midwest.
I missed my opportunity to vote in shorts because I voted early this morning and was dressed for work. The tiny hamlet where I live was "swamped" with early voters this morning. I had to wait 5 minutes!
In the larger cities in Wisconsin, there were lines two or three hours deep over the weekend. That is massive for Wisconsin.
One thing I noticed was how busy and professional the employees at the clerk's office were. We are right to thank and commend the volunteers who will be working at the polls tomorrow, but we also need to thank the employees of the various town, city, and village clerk offices across the state. Technically, we do not have "early" voting in Wisconsin. We have "absentee" voting, which is administered by paid employees of various municipal clerk offices, not by elections volunteers. The criteria for absentee voting are such, however, that anyone can vote on an absentee ballot right at the clerk's office, and thousands and thousands of cheeseheads are doing just that.
If you are still planning on voting on an absentee ballot today, be sure to thank the stressed and overworked civil servants who are even more tired from election fatigue than the rest of us. I said thank you in a nice loud voice, and I meant it. If you forgot to say thank you, writing a nice letter to the editor of your local paper thanking them might help, too. If things turn out the way we hope, the early voting strategy is going to become a prominent feature for all future presidential campaigns, and we will need the clerks on our side if we want to prevent the certain legislative roadblocks that will be thrown up by state Republicans in the near future.