Third Day of the Hammer

 

After spending 120 hours listening to my complete and unabridged Big Ears playlist, the festival added four more acts this morning and now the playlist is 123 hours long. Working my way through the new additions even as I write this.

Early voting started here in Georgia on Tuesday, and on the first day over 300,000 people voted, shattering all previous early-voting records. The latest Quinnipiac poll gives the orange turd a 7-point lead over Vice President Harris in this state, but polls are often wrong. I have no idea what the early-voting turnout portends, but conventional wisdom says that Democrats are more likely to vote early than Republicans.  Georgia flipped blue in 2020 and may surprise the pollsters by doing it again in 2024.

One thing working in our favor is that the courts have dismissed a lot of those crazy election rules here that MAGA extremists on the Georgia Elections Board tried to install (e.g., all ballots must be hand counted, counties are empowered to conduct inquiries into the voting process before certifying the results, and they can request any information and documentation they deem necessary for their inquiries). The chances for a free and fair Georgia election went up considerably with the recent court decisions.

I swung by my local early-voting site yesterday but turned away due to the crowds. I didn't see any lines of people waiting to vote, but there were lines of cars waiting to get into the parking lot for the site, and people illegally parking on the side of a busy, four-lane street. There was a person using his phone to take pictures of the tags of the cars along the street, and I don't know if he was trying to report the illegal parking or to intimidate voters (he wasn't uniformed). In any event, I drove away and I'm going to wait until next week to cast my early vote after some on the initial enthusiasm has died down.