way campaigns are run. folks can go out early. they can target people. a lot of the voters you showed in that report looked to me like obama voters. so you ve seen, i think, democrats realize that if they can extend this just beyond election day into a month, they can go on a saturday. they can have folks from churches go early that benefits their side. of course, republicans have those advantages now too. they re doing the same thing. robert, is there one party that benefits over the other in regards to early voting? if you look at ohio, republicans are really focusing at suburbs of columbus, the capital, and of cincinnati. those suburban areas are where mitt romney did very well in the republican primary. they know they re in a real disdi disadvantage in the state. the bailout is a popular theme there. both parties, craig, are focusing on the number of absentee ballot requests that that s the number political
previpr precisely who s voting early, especially in ohio. president obama leading in ohio among early voters. 57% to 39%. in 2004, just 20% of all ballots were cast early. this year, experts are predicting nearly 40% won t wait until november. to the brain trust we go. keith boykin, democratic strategist and cnbc contributor. ni nia-malika henderson. good sunday afternoon to all of you. keith, let me start with you. as of today, early voting under way in 35 states plus the district of columbia. despite recent court rule in addition ohio and pennsylvania and florida and some other battleground states that give victories to the obama campaign, how worrisome are the efforts to impose rules on early voting?
pick our president. campaigns can take advantage of that longer window of voting to encourage their supporters to vote and persuade people who may not be likely to vote. mitt romney, paul ryan, the republican ticket. both campaigns use public information about who has voted early and who has not to decide where to deploy more door knockers and run more commercials. to get them early, surrogates even craft specific messages. early vote! find your friends! get them to early vote! the best thing we can do right now is bank votes. so vote absentee. that s a deliberate plea you hear from the gop more often than four years ago. in that election, all of the evidence suggests that more democrats voted early than republicans. shortly after, ohio s gop-controlled legislature voted to scale back some early voting. there s no question, but the motivation is political.
there s a whole host of problems. in miami-dade, we have absentee ballot handlers who work in convalescent homes. you can have a tremendous amount of abuse with the absentee ballot process. in florida, we re forced to use more absentee ballots because the state has made a tremendous attack on early voting hours, reducing five days of early voting from our state process, so more voters, rather than try to face the longer lines that are going to be anticipated on election day, are looking at the absentee ballot, for example, as a way to try to get through the process. i want to give folks here some useful information, folks in florida who are going to be voting. what do people there in the sunshine state, what do they need to know to ensure that their absentee ballots are counted? well, one of the things you might do is just send a note to the absentee or the
insiders are paying attention to. in ohio, the secretary of state, he sent them to everyone. the absentee ballots tend to usually favor republicans. that s part of it too. the democrats do better in the early voting because democrats are more likely to go to the polling places. it s going to be interesting to see what happens after this election with regards to restrictions on early voting, whether in person or by mail, restrictions on voter i.d. it s going to be interesting to see what happens over the next what do you think will happen? i m not sure. i think that after the election right. i think if this is a really close election and we see there s some sort of result that dpends on the turnout in one state or another with earl vi voting, i think people will look at election fraud and issues of election reform. if you look at what we did in 2000, we had an election decided by 537 votes in florida. we had hanging chads. it didn t cause any change in