When it comes to election preparations, Mary Wilson has seen it all. The national president of the League of Women Voters is traveling extensively this fall to check on states' readiness for a huge turnout, and some of what she sees in Florida worries her. She singled out Pinellas County for having too few early voting sites (three for more than 625,000 registered voters, as of last month; Hillsborough has 13 for 661,000 voters).

Told that Clark's lack of enthusiasm for early voting has been widely reported, Wilson said: "That was reported to me by another supervisor of elections ... That's a very unfortunate situation, to not take advantage of early voting. ... Early voting is big. Voters enjoy it. It's easy." She predicted long lines throughout Pinellas on Election Day as a result, with the turnout predicted at 80 to 85 percent. (The alternative Clark has created are secure regional dropoff sites for absentee ballots).

Wilson met this week with election supervisors or local league officials in Miami-Dade, Palm Beach, Tampa and Jacksonville, and she held a lengthy news conference with the Capital Press Corps Friday.

She said Duval County appears to suffer from a lack of pollworker training and she said some counties in Florida show a "discrepancy" between the locations of early voting sites and where the majority of minority voters live, but she declined to identify those counties. "That has a discouraging effect on minority voters," Wilson said.

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