JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Good morning, everyone. The polls are open and the exit pollsters are lurking.

[BEEP]

FRANCINE:

My name is Francine. I’m calling from New York City. I got to the polls just as it opened at 6 o’clock, and there was already a line. I was walking my dog and they even let me bring my dog in and tie her inside the polling place.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Tell us your Democracy dog stories at 877-8MY-TAKE or mytake@thetakeaway.org. We re live across the country. Adaora Udoji is in Atlanta, Georgia. Andrea Bernstein, The Takeaway’s Political Director is here in New York. And we’re continuing to talk with places in key states that are seeing extraordinary turnouts, and also are looking at races that are probably going to be key to what happens tonight nationally.

Dan Malthroup is the host of WCPN’s Sound Ideas from Cleveland Public Radio’s public radio station in Cleveland. And Rob Christensen is chief political reporter for Raleigh News and Observer. Rob, where are you right now?

ROB CHRISTENSEN:

I am in a, a voting place in a suburb of Raleigh called Cary. It is - it is a town of about 120,000. It’s in the fast-growing high tech area in the Research Triangle Park and it is, it’s an affluent area. I’m in a church, Fellowship of Christ. And it is - this is the area that Obama hopes to do well in. It is an area with a lot of people who have come in from other parts of the – other, other parts of the country. The - we have, in fact, Cary is spelt C-A-R-Y, and the joke is, it stands for Containment Area for Relocated Yankees.

[JOHN LAUGHS]

So it is a – it is an area that is open to change.

[VOICE IN BACKGROUND]

I’m in the middle of, I’m in the middle of a-

VOTING OFFICIAL:

Are you an observer, sir?

ROB CHRISTENSEN:

Oh no –

VOTING OFFICIAL:

You can leave the polling place now!

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

[LAUGHS] Hold, hold on there Rob. While you get arrested, we’re going to talk to Dan Malthroup.

[VOICES IN BACKGROUND]

Dan, where are you exactly?

VOTING OFFICIAL IN BACKGROUND:

- if you’re not an observer.

DAN MALTHROUP:

At the polling place. I, I’m in the parking lot outside the Addison Branch Public Library in the huff neighborhood of Cleveland. And –

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Dan, don’t go inside, okay, you can get in serious trouble.

DAN MALTHROUP:

I won’t.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

All right, continue.

DAN MALTHROUP:

I know, I know. But, you know, there’s – this is the place where in 2004 there were huge lines. You remember Fannie Lewis, a Cleveland councilwoman, died earlier this year – in 2004 she spent the entire day fighting to get the Board of Elections to bring more voting equipment down here because there were lines out the door. A documentary was made about that, and there’s a documentary crew here right now –

[WOMAN’S VOICE]

- actually interviewing voters. I’ve also seen - I’ve visited about four or five different polling places in the last two hours, and at every one, there are Obama volunteers, a so-called line manager, comfort workers, all of these people that are coming in from all over the country to just make sure that people are casting their vote and, and know how to vote. And there’s a little confusion about the paper ballots in Cuyahoga County. They’re helping them work out that confusion, but obviously are putting sort of a good face on the Obama campaign for anybody who might be doubting. But that’s really not an issue in this blue corner of Ohio.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Well, let’s talk about the poll workers and the infrastructure. I mean, as that documentary you referred to spoke about, it was really the poorly educated staff.

[DAN TALKING/BOTH AT ONCE]

You know, I mean, there needed to be double the number of people. How do they have it deployed today?

DAN MALTHROUP:

Today - you know, at that time we had electronic voting machines in this state, and since then the entire - the Cuyahoga County Board of Elections has had an entire staff leadership turnover at the very top. The board members and the - and the director are all new. We also have new voting equipment and new procedures for training poll workers and all of that.

I’ve talked to Candace Hoke who runs the Center for Election Integrity this morning, and at the Cleveland State University she’s more or less Ohio’s chief independent poll observer. She said she’s never seen things go better in Cuyahoga County –

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Wow.

DAN MALTHROUP:

- than they’re going today.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Well, that’s good.

DAN MALTHROUP:

A hundred percent of the polls were open on time. They’re all staffed, they’re 100 percent capacity. They had lost a few, you know - about 100 poll workers who couldn’t make it, and they were quickly filled, you know, replaced with reserves. They’re really doing a – they appear so far to be doing a much better job than they ever have in the past.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

All right, Rob Christensen down in the suburbs of Raleigh. Are you doing okay down there? Did you get in a little trouble?

ROB CHRISTENSEN:

I’m okay. They asked me to leave right in the middle of the conversation, so I’m sorry about that.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

That’s all right.

ROB CHRISTENSEN:

Right now, we’re seeing a – it’s raining here in North Carolina and there actually are no lines. And, and – but there’s, there’s a reason for that, is that we have early voting in North Carolina and two and a half million people have already voted, as of last Saturday, when the early voting period closed. That is 41 percent of the registered voters.

So there has already been a tremendous turnout in North Carolina. And so we’re not seeing the huge lines. We saw the lines earlier, for example, Saturday, which was the last day for early voting. People typically waited an hour to vote, but in some places it was as much as three hours. So the, the long lines were for the early voting.

Now we can - there’s a couple of things we can say about the early voting. One is that it’s been heavily Democratic, which suggests that the Obama organization, which has a massive organization in this state, has - has been very effective in getting out the vote. We expect that today’s voting will be – lean a little bit more Republican than the early voting because they didn’t have the, the kind of organization in the state that Obama does.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Well, what about the Senate race there, Rob? I mean any, any chance that there’ll be a kind of a counter wave in support of the Republican Senate candidate?

ROB CHRISTENSEN:

Well, right now it looks like that, that there is some Obama coattails here that may work against the incumbent Republican Senator Elizabeth Dole. The race is close, but Dole has been behind in most of the polls, so it looks like she may be in some trouble right now, in part because she was very tied to President Bush and the White House.

She was recruited to run for the seat in 2002 by the White House, and in 2002 President Bush campaigned for her in the state five times, which is more than any other candidate in the country except for his brother Jeb Bush –

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Right.

ROB CHRISTENSEN:

- that year. And so she, she certainly is feeling the national tide and the - and the skepticism about Bush and, and the hard economy, and that’s, that’s showing up.

[TWO AT ONCE/OVERTALK]

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

And definitely under siege. She didn’t even make it to the Republican Convention. We should remind people there are 15 electoral votes there in North Carolina. Rob, thanks so much for joining us.

ROB CHRISTENSEN:

My pleasure.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Rob Christensen, chief political reporter for The Raleigh News and Observer.

Dan Malthroup, there are 20 electoral votes at stake in Ohio. You want to give us a quick last word?

DAN MALTHROUP:

Well it’s - you know, it’s anybody’s guess as to how Ohio’s gonna – which way Ohio’s gonna swing tonight, and it’s anybody’s guess about whether or not the - the count will actually come in tonight, or will we be waiting until tomorrow morning. So, it’s a –

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Well, it’s your guess there in Cleveland. I’m sure you’re going to have to be talking about it between now and the late hours when they finally figure out what’s going on there in Ohio. Dan Malthroup, host of WCPN’s Sound Ideas in Cleveland at a neighborhood, at the Addison Branch Public Library in the –

DAN MALTHROUP:

Great -

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

- Huff neighborhood of Cleveland. Thanks, Dan.

DAN MALTHROUP:

Great talking to you, John.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Andrea?

ANDREA BERNSTEIN:

What amazes me about Ohio is it’s still - everybody’s considering it a toss-up state. It seems so close. When you look at the differences between the Obama campaign and the Kerry campaign, the Obama campaign has spent so much more money. He’s organizing in all of the counties in the state, as opposed to three for John Kerry. And he’s turning out these huge crowds. And yet, it remains neck and neck.

JOHN HOCKENBERRY:

Right. Will organization work? And where does that organization go after this election? Again, that is the story.