Probate Judge James Naftel II traveled to several polling places today and confirmed what so many had already figured.

“Turnout’s really high,” he said during a stop at the Homewood Library. “We’re already well over 100,000 check-ins at precincts today and it’s not even 11 o’clock yet. We had 17,000 absentees so we’re hitting big numbers today so far.”

Poll workers at Sixth Avenue Baptist Church arrived at 6 a.m. and were greeted by voters who wanted to be first in line. Across town at Robinson Elementary School in East Lake, the dozens-deep line of voters stretched to the end of the covered breezeway, turned under another awning and then back to the door before voters filed in at 7.

The line at Homewood stretched to the back parking lot. Once inside, the line snaked toward a small auditorium before going back down that corridor toward the big auditorium where ballots were cast.

“It’s long,” Naftel said of the line, “but I talked to several people at the door when I came and they said it was only taking 10 or 15 minutes to get from out in the parking lot to inside. It’s moving fast.”

Approaching midday, there were few, if any, issues that were truly out of the ordinary.

“It’s the normal technical issues that we’d see,” the judge said. “The humidity, the rain this morning. Sometimes the ballots would get a little damp. It was hard to feed them into the machine, so we got some reports of jammed ballots. We’ve had to fix those.”

Similarly, the ballot pad would occasionally not tear off cleanly at the top of the ballot. That too would result in a ballot jamming a machine.

“Those are the main two things we’re seeing,” Naftel said. “People either have to try to feed their ballot in multiple times or, in rare cases, they’ll have to spoil their ballot and fill out a new one. For turnout this high, it’s kind of normal election day stuff.”

A radio announcer told of a voter who sped away after inserting his ballot. As fate would have it, he left too soon as the machine spit the ballot back out.

“It will go all the way in and if you turn around and leave really fast, sometimes it will spit it out after a few seconds,” Naftel said.

Naftel said that can happen if the ovals on the ballot aren’t filled in completely, or perhaps there were other markings on the ballot that the machine couldn’t decipher.

“We try to get our people (poll workers) to wait before they give them (voters) the ‘I Voted’ stickers until the machine accepts it,” the judge said. “But people are in a hurry. When they see it go all the way in, they’ll just hit the door. A couple of seconds later, it’ll spit it back out.”

Naftel said he’d be going from precinct to precinct most of the day checking on the poll worker teams.

This is Naftel’s final big election day as he did not seek reelection. Will he miss it?

“There’s an excitement to election day,” he said. “The preparation, that’s a slog. But today, you feel an energy just seeing people out and trying to problem solve and all those sorts of things.”

And while the Jefferson County probate judge knows no more than the next observer, he’s certain the outcome of the presidential race between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris won’t be clear for quite a while.

“It will be within the margin of error either way because it’s just so close,” he said. “Nobody’s clearly ahead nationwide.

“Alabama’s a pretty deeply red state,” Naftel continued. “I think you’re going to be waiting on Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Georgia. Nevada and Arizona have mail-in ballots they’re still taking. The ones (states) everyone says are going to be the margin (of victory) one way or the other, we may not know for a few days.”

St. Clair County had more problems today. Some of the precincts got ballots that did not include the state or a local amendment. The error wasn’t discovered until this morning, and some voters were turned away while new ballots were acquired. Poll places there will be open until 9 p.m. so people have time to return to cast their votes.