I went this morning to participate in early voting; there were lines but they weren't terrible, the parking was easy and free (which is rare on South Beach) and my kids helped me throughout.
A quick and brief diary as I just ran home to get some snacks and soda before I head back to the polling station as I'm going to be the Obama campaign's poll attorney there today.
We drove over to Miami Beach City Hall, listening to will.i.am's YES WE CAN in the car, and arrived at around 8AM, and there was still a lot of parking available - for free! - in the Convention Center parking lot. A few news trucks still waited outside but the crowds that had been there when it opened at 7AM were already upstairs on the third floor, lined up to go in to vote.
Things are moving slowly, because they have to print out a customized ballot for each voter, but the staff definitely know what they're doing, and it all moved very well. It would have been better, frankly, to have more printers/check in people, and fewer stations where you stand to bubble in your ballot but (a) nobody seemed to mind and (b) there was a nicely stocked vending machine with snacks, and another with sodas, adjacent to the line. Only in Miami Beach can you get Red Bull while you're waiting to vote.
Saw some friends in line - we'd all brought our kids. They're all experienced at bubbling in things, from standardized tests in school, so we all put our hands on the pen together, and filled in the bubble next to Barack Obama and Joe Biden's names. Then we voted for our friends Dan Gelber and Richard Steinberg, and of course for Debbie Wasserman-Schultz (my grandma, OTOH, will be voting for Annette Taddeo!) and Gwen Margolis, voted no on two and filled in the rest of the Judge and Amendment bubbles.
Then we walked to the machine that you feed the scantron-sheets into. Since the ballot was on two sheets, my older two got to put the sheets into the machine - and we got our stickers, and our Early Voting DIscount Cards, and we were done.