The Obama campaign is urging Florida voters to cast absentee ballots at their local elections offices. This comes on the heels of Elections Supervisors in Broward and Palm Beach counties advising voters to get absentee ballots and mail them in. 

The reason: long ballots and possibly long waits. 

Ion Sancho has been the Supervisor of Elections in Tallahassee for 24 years, and calls it a perfect storm of unintended consequences.

“What we’re telling citizens is that this is going to be the longest ballot you’ve ever voted on in your life”, said Sancho.

That’s mainly because all 11 proposed constitutional amendments are on the ballot in their entirety. The amendments used to be listed with only a 75-word summary, but Sancho says the Florida Supreme Court found that the ballot language submitted by lawmakers was not fair and easy to understand as required by law.

“So the Legislature”, Sancho said, “rather than write a clear and unambiguous and untainted partisan language decided instead to put the whole amendment on the ballot.”

Voters also have less time to cast ballots early. They had 120 hours of early voting in 2008. This year, they will have 96 hours at most - a decision made by the Florida Legislature. And because of budget cuts, many elections offices have reduced the number of voting locations.

It all adds up to the potential for long lines at the precincts. Voters can avoid those lines by filling out an absentee ballot and mailing it or dropping it off at the elections office.