Early Voting ---- Breaking Records

The front page of the N&O today has this lovely little story.

More than 400,000 people -- 7.3 percent of the state's total registered voters -- had cast ballots by the end of the day Monday, said Gary Bartlett, director of the State Board of Elections. The previous statewide record for early one-stop voting was 393,152 people in the presidential election of 2000.

About 500,000 voters were originally expected to cast early ballots statewide this year, but elections officials say that prediction is now almost certain to come up.

That's terrific, but election officials are saying that they still expect the lines to be really long on Tuesday. It looks like all those newly registered voters are going to case a vote. It looks like you can toss those, "Likely Voter" polls out the window. Things are wide open right now, and I don't think its possible to decipher where this is going to go.