Longer lines were trying early voters' patience as Northwest Indiana entered the final week before the Nov. 6 general election.
More than 30 people were lined up outside the Lake County Government Complex's voter registration office in Crown Point by mid-morning Monday.
"I wish they showed the expected wait time," Mike Walsh of Crown Point said from the back of that line. "I came because my wife was here Saturday and she said it wasn't that bad," he said.
Some 14,123 have walked into six Lake County voting sites in Crown Point, East Chicago, Gary, Hammond, St. John and Winfield to personally cast ballots since the early voting period opened Oct. 9. Lake election officials also have processed an additional 6,427 ballots received by traditional mail, e-mail and votes collected from home-bound voters by traveling voter registration boards.
More than 10,000 of those ballots were cast in the last seven days alone, according to a county voter registration board report.
In Valparaiso, the wait time was about 15 minutes by early afternoon Monday, according to Kathy Kozuszek, the Democratic director of Porter County's voter registration staff.
"We are extremely busy. The first day of early voting we saw 400 people. That surpassed 2008, and it's just kept going since.
"We currently have 114,000 people eligible for this election. We have served more than 12,000 and that isn't counting those in the mail," Kozuszek said.
"People are complaining about the wait and I tell them this is offered as a convenience. If they find it inconvenient, we apologize and I advised them to go vote at their polling location on election day. We are moving as fast as we can."
The pace of voting will have to accelerate in Lake County if voters there are going to surpass their 2008 total of 35,912 early ballots.
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