The line stretched out almost into the parking lot. Early voting had begun a few days before. Florida voters were taking full advantage of it.
Many of the voters lined up at the Hagan Ranch Road branch of the Delray Beach Public Library had plenty of time to get this done. One in five Floridians is over 65. Maybe one out of three people in that line was at least that age.
These were people who'd been voting at least since John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon had duked it out 52 years earlier. Voting was ingrained habit with them, even though most of them had lost their voting virginity in big metal machines with levers and curtains in New York or Pennsylvania or Massachusetts. In Florida, the voting system is totally different.
"You stand here in line until you get inside," one woman told me. She was past 80, from Roslyn, Nassau County, and had lived in Florida since 1989. "When you get in there, you sit down with somebody at a laptop computer while they see if you're registered. Then you have to prove who you are. You need something with your picture and your signature. I use my driver's license."
"What if you're somebody who gave up your driver's license?" I asked her.
"They you can use your passport. Also, the DMV here will give you an ID card with your picture and your signature, but you have to show up with three forms of proof, and one of them has to be your lease or your deed. Who has their deed handy?"
Then, the sweet old lady confided to me, "This is a really bleeped up state."
Be that as it may, Delray Beach is warm year-round, littered with golf courses and boasts glittering ocean beaches that are only six miles east of that early voting site — close enough for the tanned seniors living in the neat cluster of retirement villages in West Delray to make their way to the ocean easily.
If the voter enrollment figures are correct, most of the people in that line were voting for Barack Obama. Southeastern Florida is a Democratic stronghold. Republicans have been pushing hard with a torrent of TV commercials to elect GOP lawmakers there, and with some of the nastiest, most negative commercials anybody has ever seen. That seems to have sparked a backlash early voting spree. People in that line were grumbling about the vicious ads aired by U.S. Rep Allen West and Republican state Senate candidate Ellen Bogdanoff, whom they were eager to see lose Tuesday.
Meanwhile, upstate — in Pensacola or Jacksonville, say — the early voting lines were jammed with Mitt Romney supporters, even though he seems a bit liberal for their taste. Northern Florida is solid GOP turf. The real battle in this swing state is taking place in the Tampa-Orlando-Cocoa Beach band across the middle of the state.
Most Florida polls are inconclusive. The Quinnipiac/New York Times/CBS poll gives Obama a one-point lead here. Another poll by Gravis Marketing gives Romney a three-point lead.
Bottom line? Romney and Obama are basically dead even in their respective quests for Florida's 29 electoral votes. It'll all be turnout.
This shows every sign of being one of the closest presidential elections in American history. The Obama-McCain race four years ago ended with a victory margin of 10 million votes for Obama, but the George W. Bush-Al Gore race in 2000 left the candidates separated by only 500,000 votes nationwide.
It's conceivable that this race might give us, as 2000 gave us, one candidate winning the popular vote and one winning the Electoral College. It's also possible that the race might be so snug that it ends up in the House of Representatives, where each state would have one vote to select the winner.
Most Floridians are hoping that whichever candidate wins on Tuesday nobody will have to sit through another horrendous Florida recount. The presidential race of 2000 made the Sunshine State a national joke. Whatever the election's outcome, nobody in Florida wants to see that happen again.
Dan Lynch is a retired managing editor and columnist for the Times Union. He now lives in Florida. His website is forpeoplewhothink.com.