2012 Presidential Election, Early Voting | featured news

Ohio voters are facing extremely long lines at polling locations on Sunday. Early voting in the state has been reduced from the five weekends before the election to only the weekend right before Election Day.

Lines swelled Friday outside early voting sites around the Triangle as time to cast a ballot before next Tuesday's election dwindled. As of Friday afternoon, almost 2.39 million votes had been cast statewide, with 93 percent of those as in-person ballots at early voting sites. The total represents more than a third of registered voters in North Carolina and is approaching the 2.64 million early votes cast in 2008.

Hurricane Sandy blew the U.S. presidential race off course on Sunday even before it came ashore, forcing Republican Mitt Romney to shift his campaign inland and fueling fears that the massive storm bearing down on the East Coast could disrupt early voting.

The President voted Thursday in his hometown neighborhood in Chicago. He cast his ballot in between stops in Cleveland, Tampa and Richmond. Obama is pumping up efforts in key states, visiting eight states in two days.

Early voters could account for up to 40 percent of all voters in the 2012 presidential election, and polls of people who already have cast ballots show President Barack Obama with a comfortable lead over Republican challenger Mitt Romney.

Obama’s hoping what happened with Katy Perry in Vegas doesn’t stay in Vegas, but spreads to the whole state of Nevada to give him an edge. The president and the pop star joined forces into the wee hours on Wednesday night for a campaign rally concert in the battleground state, where they pumped up a crowd of 13,000. The sexy singer adapted her signature style for the event, turning her body into a ballot in a tight white latex dress printed with the names of the candidates.

The election is still three weeks away, but first lady Michelle Obama voted for the president on Monday. "The president and first lady are making history by voting early in person and by mail in order to promote the ease, convenience, and importance of voting," the Obama campaign said in a press release on Monday.

Meet Matt Reisetter, a weary and somewhat teed-off Iowa voter. A stay-at-home dad in his mid-30s, he has long since unplugged his two land lines to stop the nonstop calls from campaigns reminding him to vote. But that hasn’t blocked the three to four daily pieces of political mail.

A month before the closing arguments of a campaign traditionally would be made, a steady stream of voters walked into election offices across Iowa on Thursday to cast their ballots.