Charlie Crist Rises To The Occasion, Albeit A Little Late

At my Obama phone bank we talked to Florida voters over the weekend, and they uniformly described the difficulties with early voting. The lines were very long, some up to 3 hours. And people were getting frustrated and turning away. This was because of a state law mandating that the polls would only be open for 8 hours a day during the week and 8 hours total on the two weekend days. There are far less early voting sites than normal polling places on Election Day, and apparently every voter has to be matched to that early site in kind of a grueling, DMV-like process, so the lines were long.

Well, Charlie Crist, the Republican Governor of Florida, finally responded to the resultant cries of anger by increasing the hours that early voting sites can be open.

Gov. Charlie Crist on Tuesday extended early voting hours across Florida to 12 hours a day.

The executive order comes after record early voting turnout has contributed to long lines at polling sites.

Current Florida law allows for early voting to be conducted eight hours a day each weekday and for a total of eight hours during the weekends.

I think it'll be 12 hours total on the weekends now, still not great but better.

Of course, this is the last week for early voting. And so this is something Crist could have done quite a bit earlier.

Still, I'm glad he did it. "Bottlenecking" is a key element of the GOP voter suppression plan - they mean to get people frustrated with waiting in line and finally give up. Anything that alleviates that even a little is positive.