It’s still early to have much except anecdotal turnout numbers, but we are hearing back from people about their voting experiences.
Pretty uniformly, early voters are saying they've experienced a robust voting electorate. Some said they waited up to 30 minutes in line.
Jeffrey Benes told us when he voted in Westwood, Kan., at 7:10 a.m., he waited 20 minutes.
"It was good to see so many people turning out to vote," Benes said, "but I don't believe it is emblematic of the whole."
Patrick Miller, professor of political science at the University of Kansas tweeted after lunch that Douglas County saw a 65 percent increase in early voting from 2010.
He said he'd heard from several of his students that they voted early because they were scared by the new Kansas election requirements. Indeed, on Monday, the Kansas Secretary of State’s office still had some 175,000 incomplete voter registration applications for lack of proper documentation.
On the Missouri side, Alankar Patel told us he registered to vote on Sep. 29 with a remote voter registration booth at the Kansas City Health Department, where he was working.
When Patel went to vote this morning, he showed up at the poll closest to his house. It turned out the Brookside resident was listed at a much farther polling place.
When he showed up there, he was told he wasn’t registered, that his registration card came in one day after the Oct. 10 deadline.
After some wrangling he was able to file a provisional ballot, but election officials told him they were not sure his vote “would count.” The whole process took him two hours.
Here’s what Mr. Patel told me in an interview this afternoon: “I almost feel like they don’t want people to vote. After that experience I thought — I’m not gonna vote anytime again soon. But now I’m thinking I’m not gonna let people stop me from voting. I’m gonna get my vote out there”
Patel works with the homeless. He said the experience made him realize how easy it is to disenfranchise voters. His clients, he said, would have given up early on in the process.
Some of the sources for this story came from a question asked through Tell KC, a community engagement collaboration between KCUR-FM and KCPT. You can share your voting experience and join the Tell KC network through this link: http://pinsight.org/q/en/722b18106197.
