Early voting in Florida is just one example of how busy election day will be … voting started Monday in Broward and Miami-Dade counties, and voting officials are already calling for more machines to help ease long lines. “We’ve never had this kind of crowd on the first day,” an election spokesperson told the Miami Herald.

Barack Obama is leaving the campaign trail … to spend Thursday and Friday with his seriously ill grandmother in Hawaii. Madelyn Dunham, 85, raised Obama during his adolescent and teenage years while his mother was in Indonesia. He speaks often of Dunham on the campaign trail, and had this to say about her during his acceptance speech of the Democratic nomination: “She’s the one who taught me about hard work. She’s the one who put off buying a new car or a new dress for herself so that I could have a better life. She poured everything she had into me.”

Bank consolidation will likely continue … the New York Times is reporting. An anonymous official in the Treasury Department says the government doesn’t want to prop up weak banks with its $250 billion rescue package, and will encourage “super-regional banks” like KeyCorp in Cleveland and the SunTrust Banks in Atlanta to merge and absorb their suffering rivals.

So much for picking sides … We advised Barack Obama on Monday to avoid the temptation of rooting for the Tampa Bay Rays in the World Series to pick up votes, especially since the Rays eliminated Obama’s team, the Chicago White Sox, earlier in the playoffs. While Obama has officially said he is rooting for the Philadelphia Phillies, he was getting awfully chummy with Rays players at a campaign stop in Tampa Monday. “I have said from the beginning that I’m a unity candidate, bringing people together. So when you see a White Sox fan showing some love for the Rays and the Rays showing some love back, you know we’re onto something here,” Obama said.

The best lede of the day … goes to the London bureau of the Associated Press, which filed a breaking-news story starting with this awesome sentence: “Gwyneth Paltrow is helping her friend Madonna through breakup of her marriage.” In classic AP fashion, it cuts right to the heart of the story.