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First Lady Michelle Obama speaks during a campaign rally at Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio on Monday.

CLEVELAND, OH – Shortly after casting her ballot for her husband, first lady Michelle Obama visited Ohio to encourage voters in this critical swing state to follow her lead and vote for the president before Election Day.

"I'm feeling pretty fired up and ready to go, because this morning, let me tell you what I did – I cast my ballot for Barack Obama," the first lady told a cheering crowd at Cuyahoga Community College. "It felt so good. Right now my absentee ballot is on its way to my hometown, Chicago. That means we are one vote closer to re-electing my husband."

Before taking off for Ohio on Monday, Obama tweeted that she had just dropped her absentee ballot in the mail, and President Obama followed shortly with a tweet announcing that he would be voting on October 25. He'll vote in person in Chicago, giving cameras a chance to get a photo-op of him casting his ballot, even though it will be nearly two weeks before most of the rest of the country votes.

Michelle Obama has been one of the campaign's chief advocates for mobilizing the Democratic base to vote early. Her campaign schedule has often been crafted to put her in swing states when early voting begins. Rallies – like an earlier event in Delaware, OH – end with transportation to a polling place. Like her husband, Michelle Obama has gotten to know Ohio well.

She was here on Oct. 2 when early voting began. After a rally in downtown Cincinnati, volunteers directed many of the 6,000 attendees to the Hamilton County Board of Elections.

On the stump, she calls early voting the campaign's "secret weapon."

From here, Michelle Obama heads to Chapel Hill, N.C. on Tuesday and to Wisconsin on Friday, both states that begin early voting this week.

Speaking to reporters on Monday, Obama for America spokesperson Jen Psaki said they had a "superior" early voting effort compared with Mitt Romney's campaign. While both campaigns have pushed to bank votes before Nov. 6, Democrats have been most aggressive. In 2008, those who cast ballots before Election Day heavily favored Barack Obama.

"We want you all to vote early. We want you to think about voting early, whether it’s by mail, or in person, vote early,” she said. “Because if you vote early, then you can spend your time on election day getting everyone that you know out to vote."

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Legal battles have yet to be resolved in the pivotal state of Ohio over early voting and how to deal with mishandled ballots.

The Republican-controlled state government is asking the U.S. Supreme Court to allow Ohio to have two separate deadlines for early voting – Monday, Nov. 5 for members of the U.S. military and Friday, Nov. 2 for everyone else.

Last minute legal briefs were filed over the weekend, which means the justices could deliver a decision any day now.

State Attorney General Mike DeWine must decide whether to pursue an appeal in a separate case, after federal courts ruled that the state is required to count votes cast in the wrong precinct.

Ohio, like 31 other states and D.C., allows early in-person voting in the days leading up to the general election. The Ohio legislature decided to adopt the practice after the state's disastrous experience of 2004, when voting machine breakdowns and other problems caused people to stand in line for as long as 12 hours on election day.

In 2008, roughly 1.7 million Ohio residents voted early, making up about 30 percent of the total turnout. About 100,000 of those votes were cast during the final three days before the election.

But legislative changes to Ohio's election procedures in the last two years produced an apparently unintended consequence. The deadline for early voting was changed to the Friday before the general election, barring counties from allowing in-person voting on the Saturday, Sunday and Monday before Election Day.

Separate legislation on procedures for members of the U.S. military inadvertently set two deadlines for them – both the Friday and the Monday before the election. The Ohio secretary of state then ordered local election officials to honor the later deadline for military members only.

The Obama campaign and Ohio Democrats immediately sued, accusing the state of trying to suppress the turnout among older and poorer voters, those most likely to go to the polls early and improperly discriminating between military and non-military voters. The state responded that election officials needed those three days to prepare for Election Day.

Two federal courts blocked the earlier deadline for non-military voters, ruling that the state cannot value one person's vote more than another.

According to the ruling by a panel of the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals:

"With no evidence that local boards of elections have struggled to cope with early voting in the past, no evidence that they may struggle to do so during the November 2012 election, and faced with several of those very local boards in opposition to its claims, the State has not shown that its regulatory interest in smooth election administration is 'important,' much less 'sufficiently weighty' to justify the burden it has placed on non-military Ohio voters."

In a separate legal dispute, Ohio officials are considering whether to appeal a federal court's insistence that the state must count ballots that, through errors by poll workers, are mistakenly cast in the wrong precinct.

The problem arises because many polling places in Ohio handle voting for more than one precinct.  Poll workers are responsible for handing voters the correct ballots, but they make mistakes.

State law, however, forbids counting ballots cast in the wrong precinct -- even when the error is caused by a poll worker and not the voter. The state rejected more than 14,000 wrongly cast ballots in 2008, and turned down 11,000 more in 2010.  It's an issue, a federal court found, that is "systemic and statewide."

In response to a lawsuit filed by Ohio Democrats and other groups, a federal appeals court ruled last week that the state must count the wrongly cast votes, known to election officials as "right church, wrong pew" ballots.

"The State would disqualify thousands of right-place/wrong-precinct provisional ballots, where the voter's only mistake was relying on the poll worker's precinct guidance. That path unjustifiably burdens these voters' fundamental right to vote," the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals said.

ADEL, Iowa -- A pizzeria in this small city west of Des Moines was the setting for a celebrity visit Thursday from an actor once famous for talking about nothing.

But these days, Jason Alexander -- who played George Costanza on the TV series "Seinfeld" -- is a surrogate for Barack Obama, and he insists he has a lot on his mind.

"I am hardcore middle class.  And I stepped in a puddle.  And that puddle was called, 'Seinfeld,'" Alexander told about 50 supporters of the president.  He said the job put him in the upper echelons of society.

"I do not want to live in that 1-percent.  I don't believe in it," he continued.  "I don't think our country, or any country, runs well when the 1-percent is thriving and the rest are suffering and struggling."

The supporters were gathered to listen to Alexander and then walk to a nearby elections office to cast early votes for President Obama -- just one of a number of statewide events marking the start of early voting Thursday in Iowa.

Alexander told the crowd he has a "man-crush" on Obama, who he said he has met several times.

Later, in an interview with NBC News, Alexander praised Obama as a man of "conviction" and "principle," though he allowed that such lofty considerations would be beyond the reach of the man he played on television during the 1990's.

"George would probably think he was the only savior for this entire race.  He would step forward as a write-in candidate," Alexander said.

Both campaigns seem to be hoping their supporters will step forward, too -- and stick to the script.

In downtown Des Moines earlier Thursday, officials said foot traffic at the elections office had reached about 250 people by late morning -- more than double the first day of early voting in 2008.

"This was by far the busiest opening day we’ve had in the ten years I’ve been in the office," said Jamie Fitzgerald, the commissioner of elections in Polk County.

An Obama campaign volunteer waiting to vote there, Kathy Stuart, said the campaign made a push to gather supporters.

"They were trying to get people to come to breakfast, and then come to vote early," she said.  "They were really interested in getting as many voters to the polls as possible."
Iowa Republicans also threw events Thursday focused on early voting.

Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas rallied Mitt Romney supporters in Cedar Rapids, and Iowa Gov. Terry Branstad held a conference call with volunteers Thursday evening.