Early Voting Starts in Ohio

de Wikileads | Firedoglake de Jon Walker

Early voting begins in Ohio

Early voting officially began today in Ohio, the second largest swing state and one of the most highly contested. From the Columbus Dispatch:

After months of nonstop campaigning and TV commercials, the election of 2012 started to count at the ballot box today.
Early in-person voting started in each of Ohio’s 88 counties at 8 a.m. while the first of more than 922,000 absentee ballots will begin to be mailed today by county boards of elections.
Democrats marked early voting with a “Sleep Out the Vote” event at which people were urged to camp out overnight ahead of today’s opening of the Franklin County voting site.

This highlights just how little time Mitt Romney actually has left to turn around his standing in the polls. Romney is not only trailing by a few points nationally but he is doing particularly poorly in Ohio. Romney is significantly under-performing in Ohio compared to national polls, which should be very concerning for his campaign since he basically doesn’t have a legitimate path to 270 electoral votes without  winning Ohio.
From now on each day more and more people in Ohio are going to be locking in their vote. Everyday the potential pool of voters that Romney can theoretically win over with a brilliant new campaign strategy will keep shrinking.