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"Any wait time that exceeds this half-hour standard is an indication that something is amiss and that corrective measures should be deployed," according to the Presidential Commission on Election Administration, a bipartisan group that was empaneled during the Obama administration, in part after pictures of crazy long voting lines in 2012.
While most Americans are not going to wait hours to vote this year, the fact that some are is a problem and, while people who fell out of long lines this week at early in-person voting locations still have time to go back, that's not going to be the case on Election Day.
A Brennan Center study of the 2018 midterms suggested more than 3 million voters waited more than the government-recommended 30 minutes to vote. That study notes that Latino and Black voters are more likely to say they waited longer than this half-hour wait, which compounds the unfairness of it.
The presidential commission didn't mention race in the portion of its report on long lines, but rather said there are "problem jurisdictions" that are routinely failing to move voters through, thanks to long ballots, glitchy registration systems and, sometimes, feuding poll workers.
North Carolina is the latest place to open polling places. And there were plenty of pictures of long voter lines. Local new reports suggested people were waiting more than an hour in some places.
Early in-person voting starts:
in Louisiana and Washington on Friday,
Massachusetts and Nevada on Saturday,
Alaska, Arkansas, Colorado, Idaho and North Dakota on Monday,
Hawaii, Utah and Wisconsin next Tuesday,
West Virginia on October 21,
Most of Florida on October 24,
and Maryland on October 26.
When it starts in Washington, DC, and parts of Kansas on October 27, it will also be ending in Pennsylvania and Louisiana.
Check your state at CNN's voter guide.
There will be pictures of long lines, potentially, for every one of these states, although North Carolina is a key battleground this year and where more than half the votes were cast early in 2016, before the pandemic put early voting on steroids.
I looked at the wait times, randomly, in Durham at 4:35 p.m. and they ranged from 15 minutes to 55 minutes.
Mail-in ballots in limbo in North Carolina -- CNN's Dianne Gallagher talked to two North Carolina voters, Black men, whose mail-in votes have been flagged as needing a "cure." But the men, nearly a month after mailing their ballots, have not yet been contacted by Guilford County, which includes Greensboro.
And they can't cure them until the County calls them. The county has a much higher rate of throwing out ballots than other counties, according to CNN's report.
This issue of ballot curing is the subject of court battles around the country and in North Carolina, where a judge recently ruled ballots without a signature on their envelope cannot be cured.
And sentences like this from Gallagher's report are what leads to allegations
